Page:Six Months In Mexico.pdf/131

Rh the emperor for land on which to settle. He kindly gave them their own choice, and they settled at Cordoba, where they had the advantage of the tropical clime and were secure from yellow fever. They were three hundred in number, and in a short time, with true American industry, they made business brisk. Three American hotels were established, and the plantations were the finest and most prosperous in the land. Maximilian looked on the little band with favor and gave them ample aid and protection. During the rebellion the liberty party made raids on their homes, destroyed their property, and not only made them prisoners and hurried them off to Yucatan—a place from which there is no escape—but murdered them whenever they wanted some new amusement. Maximilian was powerless to help those who had prospered under his care, and just when he was to be shot the last of the colony, who feared the liberty party, deserted their once happy homes and went to another country. Only one remained. Dr. A. A. Russell, who has been the solitary American here for twenty years. The hotels have disappeared, and the plantations, now possessed by Mexicans, bear no traces of their once tidy and prosperous appearance; this is the history of the first and last American colony ever formed in Mexico, given me by the last remaining colonist, who reminds one of the last chief, inconsolable and disconsolate, keeping vigil at the tombs of his people until death shall claim him too.

" you come over here you will get a better view," spoke a gentleman as he came from the back end of the car hauling us from Cordoba to this place. We were nearly breaking our backs in a vain endeavor to look over a man and wife, surrounded by almost as many children as belonged to the old woman in the shoe, down the perpendicular side of the mountain into the deep ravine beneath. We took a survey of the speaker, of his light woolen suit with wide sombrero to match, his pleasant, handsome face, and mentally decided that he was not only worth looking at, but also worth talking to. By the