Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/32

 28 let the cooling breezes blow through, and we rejoiced an hour in the shelter from the July heat of December, and the stimulus of a Long Branch July breeze.

Then comes a walk through Progresso. This city, like our new Western enterprises, is better laid out than settled. It has its straight, broad streets running through chaparral, its grand plaza, with scarcely a corner of it yet occupied, its corner-lots at fabulous prices. That corner opposite the custom-house they hold at two thousand dollars. Others a little outside of the centre you can buy as low as fifty dollars. That is better than you can do on the North Pacific, where on a boundless prairie they will stake out a lot twenty-five feet by a hundred, and charge you hundreds of dollars for the bit.

The market-place is a projecting thatched roof over the side of a one-story edifice. On mats sit brown old ladies with almost equally old-looking vegetables. Here are oranges, bananas, black beans, squash seeds boiled in molasses, a sort of candy, and other esculents, to me unknown. Among them is one called euchre. Never having known what that too-familiar word means in the nomenclature of the States, I thought I would find out its meaning in Yucatan, so I invested a six-and-a-quarter-cent bit in this game of chance. I received a piece of the root—for so I judged it to be—looking like a cross between a turnip and a carrot. It was white, of various shapes, round, square, long. My piece was about as large round as a child's wrist, and as long as its hand. I tasted it, and was satisfied with euchre as an article of diet. If others, on one taste of their sort, would as quickly discard it, they might safely be left to make the experiment. But even my friend, the Rev. Mr. Murray, can not effect the prohibition of that appetite in that way. It is likely this would grow with tasting, as the other does, for it was sweet and not disagreeable, being like the turnip and carrot in nature as well as in looks. If it could replace the fatal fascination of its synonym, I should be glad to see it introduced into our country.

The houses of Progresso are of one story, of mortar or thatch,