Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/351

Rh roadway. They are of the type that lay behind La Camada, a gray and silver frame to that fair picture. The hills may not all be full of silver, but they all suggest it. They are all of the same blood as the silver mountains proper, and put on airs as become the kin of so rich a house. They are basaltic almost in their castellated forms, and look rather like a column of giant "graybacks" opening their serried ranks to let this column of green, and perhaps this coach and company also, march through.

Our change of mules is made in the heart of this forest. The turtle-dove (palumbra triste, they call it here) fills the air with his melancholy wail, a single note of the whip-poor-will's strain. Women are frying and men eating tortillas under a cactus by the way-side; the vista opens deep into the green forest, and every thing is quiet, soft, salubrious. One could almost make himself into a Robin Hood, and live his life in this secluded richness. How wonderfully human nature adapts itself to its condition! We go from mountain to sea, from cell to city, with a zest for each that seems insatiate. But only one offers its attractions at a time. We can not at once sail the sea and climb the mountain, unless it be a mountain wave. We are like the lad who wished every season might last forever, and was met with a record of his contradictory wishes at the end of the year.

They are not contradictory; for we are so fortunately as well as wonderfully made, that we like truly and with all our heart the conditions in which we are placed. Thus the Creator fits the clothing of the world to the shape of the soul. Whatever be that wardrobe, it seems a part of the spiritual being whom it incloses, and every place affords a sympathy with every fibre of that being.

The two haciendas are called San Bartoleo and Goral. They are practically one. From six to eight thousand persons live on these vast estates; from four to five hundred men are employed in their cultivation. They and their families absorb the chief of the