Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/178

168 ranges near on the left and rear, remote on the front and right—a prairie of scores of square miles.

We scamper over the plain in the brisk Septemberish morning, finding our shawls and capes no incumbrance. The land is very fertile, and quite generally cultivated. We pass haciendas where barley is being reaped and wheat sown, and all the offices of nature going on all the time. The chill morning air melts before the hot sun, and an August noon fits on to a fall sunrise.

We breakfast at the snug little town of Tizayuca. The funniest thing about Mexico is the names of the towns. It is a sport that is jaw-cracking. It is the punishment the Aztecs inflicted upon the Spaniards, almost equal to any they suffered. As compared with the rich vocabulary of Spain, or the sounding words of more Northern tribes, they are horrid. They sound Chinese and Japanese, and are another of the hints toward the solution of the problem as to where these races came from. Japanese junks now drift on to the western Mexican shore. This people look and act like those Asiatics. They are equally imitative, patient, subdued, industrious. They have a likeness of language. Their habits are Asiatic. There is more indifference to propriety in these Aztec women than in any of the peasantry of Europe or Egypt. It is Eastern Asia that they reproduce. So their consonant names are a like production. All of which is respectfully submitted to the learned societies of Asia and America.

Tizayuca, which brought on this excursus, seems incapable of bringing on any thing else. It slumbers like any American crossroads at midday. Not a breath nor whisper, not a buzz nor a bite, except of invisible fleas and too-visible dogs. The church absorbs the town, which consists of one-story adobe huts, hidden among useless Peru-trees and more useless maguey.

The breakfast was served from twelve to two, and was the best thing in the place, except the pleasant-voiced woman that served it, her pretty children, and the church aforesaid. It is surprising what good meals they get up in these out-of-the-way places. Beef-steak, thin-sliced fried potatoes, chicken-stews, and chocolate or