Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/326

316 are dug two and two, together or opposite. The swinging sweeps, which once existed generally in the North, here stand together or over against each other, and the boys are plying them all day long. Thus the fields are always producing, and Nature never rests, if man often does.

An old woman with a long stick having a knife on the end is cutting green buds from the prickly-pear (the nopal) that lines the roadside. "She is getting fish of the fence," said my friend. Not allowed to eat meat in Lent, they gather these buds, and cook them as a substitute. Hence this saying. The nopal is the fencing stuff of the country. It grows in orchards, grows along the way-side, wild and cultivated. It is as homely as the ass, of which it is the vegetable counterpart in universality, ugliness, and utility.

It has one redeeming feature, as has also that creature. Its blossoms are beautiful. Seldom does one see more exquisite and delicate tints than break out all over these horrid bushes, and seldom does one see so exquisite and delicate a leg and foot on beast or bird, or man himself, as concludes with a good ending the exceedingly bad beginning of the ass. It is straight, small, delicate, a natural Chinese beauty of ankle and hoof. The finest horse's leg and foot are coarse to it. So, if you will only look for it, you will find some redeeming trait in every creature of God. But this trait often makes the others more homely. Glance from a donkey's legs to his head and ears, and you are amazed at the terribleness of that opposite termination. You can not see how the two could possibly exist in the same creature. You even believe it to be a cursed degradation. It must be witchery. It can not be nature. So the nopal seems the uglier as you turn from its delicate blossoms to its leather lap-stone leaf and ungainly trunk, and general asinine vegetable humiliation.

But each serves quietly, says nothing, and waits patiently the hour when the fairy curse shall be removed, or that unfairy curse resting on all creation, the curse of sin, of Eden, and of man, and they shall have a complete symmetry after the exquisite fragments and indices that each now possesses.