Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/74

 70 rags and sores! What a commentary on Romanism! It breeds these human vermin as naturally as the blankets of its worshipers do the less noisome sort. The more "piety," the more poverty; the more of workless faith, the more of this idle work.

The pieces of our broken bodies are put together after a fashion, and we stretch our legs an hour about the town. A live mill keeps the town chattering, and gives it an unusual Mexican activity. But for that, only earthquakes, of which it has a goodly share, and the arrival of the stage-coach, would make it sensible of motion. The houses are all of one story, because of these earthquakes. A Southern gentleman told me that once, when here, a wave came, and he rushed into the court, and clung to a post for protection, while the ground rocked like a sea. He never was so frightened in his life. Well it may cause fear, for the still and solid earth is about all the basis most people have for faith or any thing else.

The church here has a picture on its façade of a priest stopping with his hands a pillar half fallen, and a motto, which was too far up for my dim eyes to read, that probably told how he had by prayer prevented the falling of that church. Mr. Tyndall will have to come down and correct these errors of faith, for as Pope, modified, says (one might prove thus that he also knew of the great volcano near),

 If Orizaba totter from on high, Shall gravitation cease if you go by?"

Why not? Here a church seems to have been upheld. If not churches, souls certainly have. The overfaith of Romanism is no worse than the underfaith of Tyndallism. Between the extremes lies the middle path of truth and safety.

A ravine goes through the town, luscious with tropical foliage and fruit. Above it hangs the chattering mill, which on its edge catches its water and busily makes the native wheat into flour. It was the first factory I had seen in Mexico, and therefore doubly interesting. Twenty-five dollars for a barrel of flour should generate more grist-mills and wheat-fields, if protection is the true policy. The narrow lanes run through banana gardens to the open