Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/406

394 The road still glides downward, amidst blossoming orchards, tall and fragrant, gardens and flower-beds, into the city, down its still slight incline to the plaza and my pleasant quarters.

The heat is intense. It is in a tunnel of mountains that draws all the rays. But the largest and coolest of the hotels of the diligence company refreshes me. This hotel concludes our sojournings of such sort; for only ranchos await us nightly between this city and the Gulf. Its wide porches, and flower-full patio, and plumed and singing birds surpass Saltillo's and all before.

It is Saturday, and the last Sunday in the country is to be passed here. A bath seems the first necessary preparative. So I go to the shop of my German co-traveler, a sombrero manufacturer, and get as near his chamber as a huge dog permits. He tells me, what I tell you, never to take a bath in this country in the afternoon. A gentleman, he says, came up from Matamoras, took a bath after his arrival, and died before the next morning. I content myself with a hand-bath, which is as good as the more formal ablutions.

This same gentleman gives me another bit of information more in the line of his business, yet having an inference wider even than a sombrero brim. He says the Mexican heads average six and three-quarters and six and seven-eighths, hatters' sizes; Americans average seven and an eighth. I had noticed the difficulty of getting hats, in the capital and elsewhere, large enough for the heads of American travelers, and called his attention to it. This fact was given in reply. That is the size of the heads of our boys at twelve. Does it mark, then, a type of civilization, and their relation to the bigger-headed and bigger-brained races of the Teuton type?

I spent the rest of the day in hunting up some of these big-headed brothers. The first I found was as small of head and body as the people among whom he dwelt. He was the missionary of the American Board, the Rev. John Beveredge, a slim, sickly gentleman, whose lungs had driven him first to South America, and then to this everlasting summer. The Master has modes to-day of scattering His apostles, and so increasing His Church, less terrible, but not less certain, than those which prevailed in the earliest