Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/164

138 is a Mexican farm run?" and before the rather astonished son of the soil could reply to the question, another  Gringo replied: "Sir, Mexican farms ain't run; they are walked." There is, indeed, no running about the business, or, if there is any, they run themselves. In places, one encounters the queerest mixture of the modern and the prehistoric. On one hand can be seen the most up-to-date American agricultural machinery and, on the other, grain winnowed by being tossed into the air or trodden under foot by mules. The man who goes through Mexico hoping to sell agricultural machinery to the natives may, indeed, dispose of some. Watches have been worn by the King of the Cannibal Islands, but as personal ornaments, not as chronometers, and it is precisely as toys that most Mexican farmers buy these things. Should a reaping machine get out of order, it is a hundred to one that it will remain so, and that it will be cast on one side and neglected, perhaps left standing in the middle of a field. Such a sight is sufficient to make the Anglo-Saxon weep, if he ever does weep; but it will draw not the slightest comment from the average Mexican, who would probably observe that the red paint with which it was covered lent a bright note to the rather sombre landscape of the tierras templadas.

The Mexican native plough is a wooden affair, with a small iron share designed to scratch the earth to the depths of about a finger-length. Many heavily-shod footballers make a more respectable furrow every time they fall. It takes a couple of men to manage this archaic instrument, and it is dragged by as many oxen as could pull a South African wagon. The Mexican cart used in farming work might be suitable for use in the moon, where the specific gravity of objects dwindles to one-third of its terrestrial complement. It has two wheels, which are perhaps a little more suited to locomotion on a rough highway than the runners of a sleigh, and which seem to have a marked affinity for mud and ruts. There are lighter wagons for use as conveyances; and Charnay, the French explorer, gives a vivid description in