Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/382

 370 attached to this rancho, and other flowers and growing grains give proof that the air here, if chill, is never cold.

A long, long posta of fourteen leagues (thirty-six miles) follows, over a wide plain, with scarce the sign of habitation. Five leagues out we meet a private coach and gentleman, the coach covered with cloth, a common usage here, to preserve it handsome for the city paseo; for this coach contains a Congressman, who is on his way to the city, and the session. Not another sign of life, save in bush and tree, and not much in them, till the twelfth league is reached. Some horses grazing in the bushes look wistfully at us, envying, doubtless, their brothers in the coach, as boys, with all their liberty, envy the burdened man, harnessed and dragging his weary load up hill and down hill till he drops it, or drops under it, dead. A rag on two high bushes marks a house for an Indian family, and relieves the monotony of desolation. The sun has risen with a burning heat. Yesterday we shivered in a shawl till near noon; to-day we swelter in the shade, and solicit and enjoy the breeze that blows through the coach, albeit much dust gets mixed up with it.

The vast prairies are thinly covered with shrubs of mesquite, and even the Spanish bayonet gives out, and dwindles to meagre proportions. A red-headed cactus, big-headed too, glows by the roadside, sharp, but not unlovely. This is the beginning of the chaparral region, whereof we heard so much in the days of General Taylor, and which Lowell so humorously sets forth in his "Bird of Freedom Sawin'." It is hard-looking stuff to march through, being short, and as sharp as a virago's temper.

How is it that these tropic plants are so apt to be prickly? Almost every bush and tree you meet from here to Mexico is of this repellent type. Is it that heat in the blood of nature is like heat in the blood of human nature, and produces the noli-me-tangere state of the Scotch thistle and Scotch terrier? These palms, this mesquite, the cactus, all are thorny, cross, and "let me alone."

Every reader of these pages has undoubtedly heard of oases in