Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/145

Rh It is pitiful to see these miles and miles of acres surrendered to this pestiferous production. Yet it is pleasant to look upon, as was the fruit Eve tasted and Adam ate, man being generally greedier in crime than woman. The fields are laid out with mathematical exactness. The maguey plant, for that is the name of the pulqui bearer, is a large aloe, with grand, broad green leaves, very broad and very green. The plants stand about ten feet apart, in rows twenty feet from each other, so that the field looks like a nursery of dark, lustrous green bushes. You can see down these green alleys sometimes for miles in this clearest of airs. They radiate regularly from every plant, a perpetual chess-board of tropical luxuriance. They are of various stages of growth, from the infant of days to the patriarch of seven to ten years.

The latter is about to yield his white heart for the delight and ruin of the people. He is about four feet high, sometimes more, and spreads over as much or more from the short, thick, bulb-like stem. Sometimes he is ripe at eight years, more usually ten. The owners thus gather a crop from one-eighth to one-tenth of their shrubs annually. When it is ripe, they thrust the knife near or into the root, so as to prevent its farther growth. The leaves fall over, the bowl-like centre swells with the juices pressing into it. It looks of the capacity of a couple of water-pails. This is of a milky look, and sweet, it is said, at this time. It is taken out twice a day for four months, so that one good plant yields four or five hundred gallons of this substance.

This is put into ox-skins, a little of the old pulqui is added for fermentation, and the new is made worse. So delicate is this substance at the start, that a pinch of salt or any other mal-affinity will destroy the whole crop if it is put into one of these skins and gets passed from one to another. An overseer, being dismissed, took this sweet (or sour) revenge on his master, and by one drop of acid, or salt, spoiled a crop worth a thousand dollars. He was arrested and imprisoned for this petty but powerful revenge.

If it is so sensitive when young, it gets bravely over it, for a more disgustingly smelling and tasting substance than it is when old the