Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/433

Rh State, forty times her size. Many beautiful flowers cover it. I gathered over a dozen different varieties round one rancho, and comforted and strengthened the wavering heart with that apostolic promise, "If God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" These lovely grasses of purple, and scarlet, and blue, and pink, and lustrous white, and golden yellow, and variegated, how brief their life! That beautiful soul far surpasses these creatures in original excellence, infinitely more surpasses it in that its day is eternal.

It is hard sometimes to realize this, as you step into one of these dirty ranchos and see these unwashed, uncombed, almost undressed women and children, and imagine the change that Christ would make if fairly seated in their hearts. He will come, and the flower that fades be excelled, even at its beginning, by the flower that grows in beauty forever and forever. They are kind and hospitable now. How generously a mother and three girl-children, who seemed to have never known a comb or a towel, feasted me on thick milk and delicious coffee, and Spanish chats and smiles! Won't they take to Sunday-schools and all their cleanly accompaniments, when they get out of their Spanish and their Romanism into the light of English and Protestantism?

The fields show great herds of many cattle feeding. Words-worth thought, when he said, "There are forty feeding like one," that he was describing a good-sized herd. What would he have said had he seen these hundreds and thousands? The prairies, rolling slightly, and dipping down into the sky on every side, are sprinkled with kine. There are thousands feeding like one. Well, it is only multiplication. He first said, if he did not first see, the fact of the silent feeding of great flocks and herds. The prairies would have amazed him more than the cattle. That forty, to his petty and pretty Rydal meadows, were vastly more than these hundreds to these prairies, actually boundless to the eye. They are lost on the ocean. The cattle on a thousand hills are here transformed into thousands of cattle on level plains.