Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/177

Rh The time came for us to go. It always comes to blissful or painful sojourners. Four nights and three days had we traveled and chatted, and prayed and preached, and mingled all the good things of both lives happily together. "How to make the best of two Lives" is the title of a good book. One might answer, "Go to Mr. Comargo's, the commandant of the mines at Pachuca, and spend a Sabbath and two week-days in and about that romantic spot." General Palmer had engaged a mule-team to take him and his Philadelphia-Paris compadre across the country. He generously offered me a seat in his "waggin," as they pronounce it here. You would never dream how it was spelled from that pronunciation. I do not know now. It sounds like a corruption of our word wagon.

The offer is gladly accepted, and we pass out of the narrow streets of the city of silver at about sunrise, into the paradise that incloses the town on its southern side. Paradise always looks a little more paradisiacal when at a distance than on closer inspection. Shall we be disappointed in heaven? Disappointed in getting there, I fear. As Dr. Watts said, "disappointed at three things: at seeing some there whom we did not expect to see, and not seeing some that we did expect to see, and especially disappointed at seeing ourselves there." May this happy disappointment be ours, every one.

Our Pachuca paradise is as green as it promises from the hill-top, looking down. The road runs amidst trees, a brown river with greenest banks. The favorite tree is called the Peru-tree, of slight green leaves, bearing a red berry in clusters; not unlike in look to the checker-berry, as it is called in New England, but very unlike in taste, for this berry is puckery in the extreme. Yet birds like them, and so every thing has its uses. It makes a pretty ornament to the landscape, its varied colors making the fields into an aviary of cardinals—an appropriate effect for a papal land. The maguey flourishes in all its greenness, and very handsome it is in its sweep of leaf and depth of hue. The mountains rise on our left, near and dark and cool. The fields spread out, a level upland, limited by