Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/118

112 now in a country where the freighting business is carried on, mostly, with heavy wagons and heavier ox-carts with enormous wheels of wood, with wooden axles and no felloes, the whole middle of the wheel being filled with a solid block of heavy wood. The oxen are yoked by the head instead of the neck, and driven, half a dozen yokes to a single cart, like mules before a wagon. The wives, and often the children, of the cart-drivers accompany them on their long journeys from city to city, and one of their camps by the roadside is a little village in itself. The poor people of the villages along the route live, to a considerable extent, by supplying these teamsters and other travelers with articles of food, cheese, fruit, cigarritos, matches, and ardent spirits. A bottle of the fiery liquid distilled from the mescal plant, otherwise called the "American aloe," or "century plant," which blossoms in this latitude in five to seven years from planting, instead of once in a hundred, as is commonly believed at the North—called "mescal"—is sold at the little wayside stands for six and one-fourth cents, and will produce as much drunkenness as a barrel of North American whisky.

There is a superior variety of the mescal produced near Guadalajara, and called after the village in which it is made "Tequila," (pronounced Tekela.) This costs more, and is sent to the City of Mexico and elsewhere, as something very choice for a present to one's friends. I took one drink of it under the supposition that it was annisette, or some other light liquor, swallowing possibly about an ounce, druggist's measure, before I smelled the burning flesh as the lightning descended my throat. As I sat down the glass my head began to increase in size so rapidly, that I saw at once,