Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/156

14 Why all this palaver About Orizava?

Then adds, toastingly and drunkenly,

We'll tip the brandy-bottle To old Iztaccihuatl.

And teetotally concludes,

We'll drain our water-kettle To Popocatepetl.

Of course he would have gone on thus all day had he not been held in. He was pouring forth the terrible rhymes as if they were avalanches. "Slaver" it was found would rhyme and reason with this Orizava, and "throttle" had to be put to the voluble neck of this Iztaccihuatl; while a lot of mispronounced rhymes, such as "settle," "met ill," "nettle," and so on, were being mustered into the service of the grand old monarch of Mexico. It was time to stop the rhymed nonsense, and it stopped. Sober debates on temperance and other good themes came to the front.

The light slides down the mountain ("coasts," as a Yankee ought to say), down its smooth and lustrous sides, and soon fills all the hollow of the hills with splendor. The soul sends its shafts of light upward as those of the soulless world fall downward, and in silent prayer and praise ascribes the honor, and glory, and dominion, and power thus seen, and the infinitely more and greater not seen, unto Him that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb forever.

One side of the roadway leaps down sheer and profound, and the other opens ravines, or descends in mountain slopes, where easily "the robber rends his prey" from the slowly-climbing coach and rider. There is a thicket of bushes at one of these bends, which is their favorite haunt, and yet no one thinks of the simple remedy of cutting up that ambuscade. Fifteen minutes and a hatchet would destroy that fortification. Why is it not done? Quien sabe?