Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/409

 into the other, and through the pines, while yet in the mountains, gain glimpses of fields of sugar-cane and the fresh verdure of a foliage that frost never injures. We rattled down the hills, crossing more streams than on the eastern side of the range, the heat growing stronger, though the afternoon was waning, and reached the town at four.

Having a letter to the chief missionary of the Protestants, from my good friend Mr. Patterson of Mexico, I set out in quest of him, and it surprised me to learn that hardly any one in this very small city could direct me to the mission. At last I found el templo, the mission building, a long and low structure built around two sides of a square, and the kind pastor insisted that I should at once take up my quarters with him. A "shake-down" was provided, at the expense of a visiting missionary from the country, who slept on two benches wrapped in his sarape, and, though warned of the scorpions of Cuernavaca, which delight in dropping upon a sleeper unawares, I was at an early hour asleep in the hot country again. The mission here, purchased with much difficulty by Mr. Patterson, is a valuable property, and includes not only a lovely garden, and a fountain fed by a perpetual stream, but a large field of alfalfa and plantains. The devout and earnest Mexican minister in charge had collected a flock of some seventy sincere converts, and was laboring, under many disadvantages, to add to the number from among his neighbors and fellow-countrymen. None of them spoke English, but that did not seem to render them unhappy, and they had acquired the good old Methodist fashion of calling one another brothers, hermanos, and sisters, hermanas, and of praying with an unction that was all the more impressive from being in the sonorous Spanish tongue.

Now I was not on a religious mission, although my lines were for the nonce cast with the missionaries; but was quite well satisfied with much smaller game than that afforded by the genus homo; for while my friends were directing their efforts towards bagging the Mexican, I was merely hunting birds and butterflies. But they graciously relaxed their pursuit of the larger quarry long enough to accompany me on mine of the