Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/383

 Rh the desert. You did not hear of much else in the way of figures, if your juvenile composition life was passed where mine was. It was a cheap and favorite illustration of sentimental youth, who called every "goody" their mothers sent them, every holiday their teachers gave them, every love-sick emotion a fair face bred in them, oases in the desert of their lives.

Well, what they fancied I experienced in reality. I had tried every way to get over the long, lazy stretch of thirty-six hot and pulverized miles of dismal monotony. We drove past a line of wagons, four yoke of oxen to each, and the wagon itself, about two feet wide and six feet high, with palm-leaf matting sides and a peaked roof like a house, covered also with matting, the most curious wagon in the country so far. The wheels were bigger than the house upon them, and the eight oxen seemed intended to drag the wheels.

The wind blew the way we were going, and so we added their dust to our own, a proof that we do not always get out of other folks' dust by getting ahead of them. In fact, we not unfrequently get into it the more; for they blow after you that which they can not leave after for you.

After this weary eating of our own dust for so hot and long a spell, and even of that of those whom we had passed in the slow race, we came in sight of a stately hacienda. Its white walls glistened like a fortress. Its silver reduction chimneys towered, cannon-like, above its gates. Its broad, clean plaza, very broad and very clean, received us. The driver stopped in its centre, regardless of the hotel door, where he usually pulled up. I ask where breakfast is to be got. "Anywhere," he says, tossing his head quite indifferently. I push round to a gate-way, and ask a servant the same question. He points to a closed room. In it I see through the window a man writing. Not much sign of a breakfast there. I push my inquiries farther with like cold courtesy. At last, bewildered, I express my indignation at their neglect. A young man in a wide gray sombrero, pistol at side, white-appareled, says in good English, "You wish for a breakfast, sir?"

"Yes, sir," is the reply;