Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/159

Rh and numerous, scattered up and down the steep hill-sides. My English companions thought they had seen the like in Yorkshire. Yet the chief if not only likeness is in the chimneys, and in the fact that they are used in running steam-engines of immense bulk, which are engaged in pumping water out of the mines. This was the New. No such contrivances had the cavalcades of the Old times ever seen. One of these engines, of two thousand horse-power, is beautifully lifting its ponderous arms, as polished and quiet as is its Manchester builder. It is an evidence of the superiority of our age. Two thousand horse-power there in that engine, twenty in this escort: one hundred times is the New above the Old!

It is a festa day, and the natives are idling round. But the engines are busy, being worked by Englishmen, who know no festas but Sundays and Christmas. A bull -fight is to come off, and especial stir among the natives is evident. If they would fight their sins, and idleness, and errors of faith, and other infirmities, half as zealously as they fight the harmless bulls, they would "get on," as our English friends say, vastly more; but religious error stifles all energy, order, and improvement.

These immense engines teach us the costliness of the mining business. It may be an easy matter to prospect a mine, but it is not so easy a matter to work it. That costs a fortune, and reduces this royal business to the common level of farming and shoe-making. After looking over the works at this spot, we take to our horses, I gratefully getting a seat in the carriage, and whirl down to Velasco.

Six miles of rapid descent it is, winding round and round the spurs of handsomely wooded hills, which woods the steam-devil, as the Mexicans call the steam-engine, is fast devouring. In its locomotive form it devours miles; in all forms, forests. The hills are not unlike those of Vermont, but steeper, deeper, and grander, with warmer, thicker-leaved, and darker-tinted woods. Some of the gorges are sublime. Opposite these ravines tower high, blank, black mountains, some of which are curiously crowned with