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Rh us to take the train. Heavy baggage was, or should have been, weighed and registered overnight.

It is but six o'clock as we move out of the station. A big sun is slowly rising over the dry, hot chapparral outside the city. Although it is early April, all is parched like midsummer. Soon, however, we begin to climb, and, as we ascend, pass through forests of wonderful growth. Sugar-cane and coffee plantations now appear; and the trees are hung with orchids, tangled with vines bright with blossoms, many of them fruit-trees now in flower, one mass of white or pink. The road crosses water-falls, winds round ravines, under mountains, through tunnels, climbing ever higher and higher, until Córdoba is reached at an elevation of over 2,000 feet. This town is surrounded and invaded by coffee plantations and orange groves. At the station baskets of delicious fruits are offered us—oranges, bananas, grenaditas, mangoes. Here we bid farewell to the tropics, and forget the snakes and the fear of vomito.

The climate we are seeking is not a tropical one. Whoever associates Mexico with the characteristics of heat, malaria, venomous reptiles, has received a wrong impression of it. Such places, with their drawbacks, exist within the geographical limits of the country, but it is wholly unnecessary to seek them; for the towns of historical and picturesque interest are above the reach of tropical dangers, for the most part, while there are seasons of the year when even the warmer portions can be visited with safety and delight. At Orizaba the climate is