Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/424

412 "Buen!" (well), as they say here, the same as we; our bad dinner has given us a good long dessert in the shape of a dull sermon.

Good-bye to the hung beef, a clothes-line of which is stretched across the yard; to the poor cooking and pretty faces; to the casa and its owner; and, it must be confessed, to the somewhat henpecked-looking husband and father; to the custom-house friends; and to San Antonio.

The hot day drags to its close. The mules onward "plod their weary way." Gray's ox is not slower. How their prancing fleetness is changed.

The same green wood everywhere embraces me that has embraced me for this last two hundred miles—mesquite, mesquite, mesquite. It sometimes rises to the height of an apple or willow, very rarely to that of a maple. Brush is its proper level. Grass, weeds, thorny bushes, ground-flower cactuses of yellow and purple and magnificent crimson, humble, but hardly less beautiful, thornless pink, and daisy, and dandelion—very old, dear, homely, and homeful creatures—and chiquitite, tiniest flowers of every sort, a bed of beauty; such is the rich, green desolate valley on the Mexican side of the Grand River of the North.

For three hundred miles it is practically without inhabitant. Not less so is the American side. Every inch fertile, and capable, like the ground of a certain rich man, of bringing forth abundantly. Why should so many starve and pinch and toil when this abundance goes untouched? How alike is the God of nature and of grace! Ever thus He spreads His table of salvation in the wilderness, and ever thus man prefers starving in sin to sumptuous fare at His overladen board. For four thousand years has He said, "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price."Still they come not; they dig out their own broken cisterns; they eat their own tasteless food.