Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/119

Rh that unless I got outside immediately, the door would be too small to admit of my passing through it. Seizing my hat which appeared to have become of about the size of an ordinary umbrella, I turned it up edgewise, and succeeded by a tight squeeze in passing it through the door; the street then appeared funnel-shaped, and I remember an odd fancy that I was to resemble the man who "went in the big and came out at the little end of the horn." Curiously enough my legs decreased in size, as my head enlarged, and my last recollection of the affair is that my person resembled a sugar hogshead walking off on two straws: body I had none. No more tequila for me, please!

The teamsters and muleteers drink this clear, colorless, harmless-looking concentrated lightning with apparent impunity; but a single bottle of it will cause a rebellion among an entire regiment of soldiers, and very likely result in a pronunciamento on the spot. Nevertheless, the ox drivers, like the muleteers, are a quiet, well-behaved, and generally honest and trustworthy class of men, quite equal in these particulars to any class in the same walks of life in any country.

When we were in the pass through the hills, between the Valleys of Zacoalco and Guadalajara, our team went down in a mud-hole of unusual depth and enormity, and stayed there for nearly two hours before it