Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/33

Rh covered with a high roof of thatch. This high roof is open inside, and makes them shady and cool. The sides are also often of thatch, and they look like a brown dwarf with a huge brown straw sombrero pulled over his eyes. Some of those built of mortar have ornamental squares in the sides, where shells are carefully set in various shapes in the mortar, and which make a pleasing effect, the diamonds and other shapes giving the walls a variety that is really artistic. Why could it not be imitated in larger buildings at home? One house had the word "Sepulcro" in large letters chalked along its front. "What does that mean?" asks one of the party. The occupant was sick a long time, and the boys thought it was about time he had died, so they chalked that word along the door to express their conviction of his duty. He ought to be dead—dead he shall be called. A grave joke, that.

Here I first tasted the sort of chocolate of which Montezuma was so fond, and which he took so thick as almost to make it an edible. A brown, brawny woman made us a cup of the same in a bamboo-sided, rush-roofed cafe'. It was worthy Montezuma's praise: Parisian chocolate takes the second place hereafter, and a good way below the first. It is prepared in milk, and is a thick, soft liquid that melts on your tongue and "goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak." That dame would make her fortune by such a café in New York. But, then, she probably wishes for no fortune, and her secret, the secret of all the dames of the country, may never be revealed outside the land itself. You must come to Mexico to know how "chocolatte" can taste.

The fields about Progresso have chiefly shrubs of the cactus order. Beautiful flowers of purple, yellow, and crimson abound. Here grows wild the heliotrope, the fragrant purple flower that is scattered so generally at funerals. The sweet-pea and other cultivated delights of the Northern hot-house and garden are blossoming abundantly.

The cocoa-palm throws out its long spines, deep green, thrust straight out from a gray trunk, that looks as if wrapped in old