Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/385

 Rh The Spanish bayonet here comes to the front again, and puts on some of its queerest forms; and nothing can look queerer. Here is one with two legs coming together in its spiked head, like a boy's picture of a scared man, with his hair erect. Another has a single trunk and two arms stuck out, and a bushy head between, another infantile drawing. Two are ogling each other, their crooked backs crowned by projecting barrels of spikes that look like grinning faces; and here are two others, evidently back to back, frowning fiercely out of the same wrathful hair. A row of them, of every size, shape, and position of crookedness, looks like Falstaff's army, with tremendous fierceness in their weak though plumed heads. One was so perfect a statue, that I could not believe it to be any thing but a man till after passing it, and hardly then. Their grotesqueness is inimitable. Hood's queer pictures, and Thackeray's and Nast's and Cruikshank's, are all surpassed by the common doings of this palma. It is the harlequin of Nature, the clown and the court fool of her royal palace here.

The hills seemed to grow greener, and the fields also, perhaps because of the refreshment body and spirit had received, perhaps because I had learned that it was their intention to do so soon. Still they did increase in verdure. The hills especially began to put on velvet. It became them well, but no better than their previous, nakedness. They were sculptured so admirably, that one feels as if they were statues, and needed no wardrobe.

But that western side, so daintily robed in soft, short green, does not look any the worse for the apparel. Indeed it is an improvement, for it fills up the rough clefts and rounds out the contour to a perfect symmetry. You never saw and never will see out of Mexico such foldings of rock, draperies tight-fitting yet flowing, cavities that are dimples, and swellings that are the rounding out of