Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/316

306 Swinging round one of these blank and profitless points after another, we suddenly strike a small but beautiful green garden, full of loungers. Another sharp turn, and we are in the busiest street I have seen in Mexico: one side set with seats all occupied, the other with shops, chiefly of drink, and all the street alive with people. So we race through street after street, narrow, backed up against the hills, intensely crooked (as how could they otherwise be?), until another green plaza is passed, and we halt with a jerk, and a crunch as of steam-brakes, in the heart of the hole, at the Hotel Concordia.

It is the most Yankee town in Mexico. Indeed, few in Yankeedom are as Yankee. Dover and Lynn do not turn out as many gazers at the passing trains as these sidewalks and windows do to the rattling coach. Lowell is as full of street loungers; Manchester, perhaps; but no other.

I found Americans here, and was at home, both in the place and the language, from the start, and rejoiced at so delightful an ending to my unusually bad beginning. The road of which I had heard nothing, and which I had supposed so rough, was smooth as a Red River prairie. The robbers changed to chatty drivers and market-women, and the end was as home-like as the Merrimac or the Alleghany. So may every dark still turn to brighter day!