Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/425

Rh Shall it be always so? Will every generation thus treat the Lord and His royal feasts? Many have come; more will.

These lands are filling up. Those superb white Roman Campagna oxen that just passed us are driven by a new settler. That pretty log-hut, with its half-dozen Yankee-looking men and women at its door, is the first I have seen in Mexico. How like Minnesota it looks. Only Minnesota does not have such a soft spring garb on this second day of April. They are the indices of the coming myriads that will make this lovely desert lovelier with human life and love. So shall the overflowing and ever-neglected gifts of God in Christ, this wilderness of grace, this prairie ocean of salvation, be more and more appropriated by the sinful, sensual heart of man, famishing for bread, hungering and thirsting after the righteousness of Christ. They shall reject alike the crudities of superstition and of false and haughty self-sufficiency, the religion of idolatry and of a spurious humanity, and, sitting at the feet of Christ, Creator, Saviour, Brother, shall grow up into Him who is the head over all things, blessed forever.

The sun is gone; the shade is coming. Matamoras is a long sixteen miles off, at our slow walking pace, but the first jotting in a Mexican coach is ended. Not so the joltings; they continue till day-break. The musings with the pencil end at dusk at a rancho by the roadside, the last and worst of all. Still the tortillas and the coffee, as being the last, were kindly entertained, the children duly patted and pennied, the parents praised; and gladness unspeakable filled the heart as the slow mules pulled slowly away. No more starting off in a whirlwind rush; that is reserved for city taverns, where glory and gain go together. It is night-fall ere they leave, and six leagues (sixteen miles) are to be dragged over. Midnight they are due, and in expectancy thereof I foolishly mount on the top of the coach. The woods grow denser as the sky grows darker. The branches brush my head, but I am no fly, and not to be brushed into the empty coach below. I sit it out, seeing fantastic forms in every shadowy clump, riding up to vast walls that bar our way, straight, smooth, and high? How is it possible to