Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/252

242 How would you "get on" if, inquiring of a gardener the name of a certain tree, he should generously and abundantly reply: "Esta es la zapote amarylla, esta zapote chico, esta el mango, esta la mamme, esta huave," and, pointing to the most beautiful of all, "esta coculi sutchel?" You would delight in recovering your English and your senses by saying "That is the ash." And as handsome as any is the ash, grand and green above its fellow of the North. Yet these trees are worth praising, and the flowers, especially that of the odd name, "cocoli sutchel." It is a bouquet of fragrance and beauty unsurpassed. It grows at the end of tall, gnarled, homely boughs and trunk, a dozen separate flowers, each as large as the largest pinks, but of few petals. Red and white, it crowns this homely tree, a perfect vegetable beauty and beast.

Magnificent roses blossom by the wayside, blush, crimson, white, as sweet-smelling as their best brothers next June in New York, and finer of tint and body than any you will meet there and then. Oleanders hang out their blazon, and huge white lilies depend parasitically from appropriated boughs. The orange bears its three-fold burden of flower, and green, and yellow fruit. One bunch of eight big yellow boys on a single stem is bought for four cents, and sent with the regards of the wife of the consul-general to the wife of Dr. Butler—a present, like all the best gifts, valued much above its cost.

Brooklets trickle by the roadside, and banana groves stand thick and tall as Illinois corn, thicker, if not taller, with bunches of fruit, and purple flower-buds big as pine-apples, and like them in shape.

Two children are playing bull-fight in the street, the boy on horseback, astride a stick, varying that Yankee-boy pleasure with throwing a lasso around the neck of a younger brother, who follows him around, bellowing and bullying. They laugh in wild glee over the childish imitation.

A school in these bowers keeps up the noisy rattle of studying aloud, the tinkling bell not suppressing but encouraging the tumult. It was amusing, in one of these schools, to see how some boys showed their assiduity in study, on the presence of these