Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/72

 68 winds and leaps across this. chasm. It becomes almost circular in its twists and turns.

The coffee haciendas line the roadside. The bush is usually small, not over six or eight feet high, and spreading out like a bar berry-bush. The berry is scattered over it, having a reddish tint, sometimes quite light. It is picked of this color, and ripened to its familiar brown by exposure on mats. You see it spread out in the door-yards, for this is its harvest-time. The sun is too hot for the coffee-tree, and so they plant bananas and other taller and thick-leaved trees among it to shade it from the direct rays. It wants heat, but not light.

The Mexican coffee is among the best in the world, the best Colima berry at the west coast selling as high as a dollar and a half a pound. It is prepared very strong, and then served up with two-thirds hot milk, if you are not acclimated. As you become so, the proportion of milk disappears, until it is well-nigh all coffee. But the coffee-house boys always bring two pots, one of coffee, one of hot milk, and pour at your pleasure. Here, too, one of Dr. Holmes's proofs of the millennium is satisfactorily settled:

 When what we pay for, that we drink, From juice of grape to coffee-bean."

The juice of grape is still here a fabulous beverage. Logwood is too plenty, and grapes too few. But the coffee is coffee. As Thurlow Weed says he always eats sausage serenely in Cincinnati, because there hog is cheaper than dog, so here coffee is more plentiful than chiccory or peas, and one can feel assured that he tastes the real article. It will become more and more an article of export, and replace the Rio berry, to which it is far superior in flavor and softness, even if it does not rival the Java and the Mocha. Among the beverages that will drive out the gross intoxicants, lager and whisky, is this pleasant Mexican coffee.

Orizaba has such an entrance as gave our critical companion a right to justify his charge against the road. The stones that once paved it lie knocked about on the surface. Deep holes abound.