Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/455

 In about an hour and twenty minutes after leaving the station the diligence suddenly pulled up at Xochihuacan. If the reason why we halted here is not evident at a glance, I may explain that we needed time to pronounce this Aztec name, not being able to get around it in our then exhausted condition. We hailed it with light hearts, but with heavy stomachs; for we had inside us an amount of disintegrated Mexican earth that would have entitled us to honorable distinction among the clay-eaters of the Orinoco. We took breakfast that morning at a thriving settlement of one house and a mule-shed, known as Tepa, where we were first introduced to the pulque of that region. As it was made on an adjacent hacienda, and was the best in the county, we essayed a drink, clasped our noses, breathed a prayer to the Virgin of the Remedios,—the patron saint of pulque-drinkers,—and gulped it down. Having thus washed the dust from our throats into our stomachs, we started on again.

Northeast of the city of Mexico is a cluster of the richest States in the republic, consisting of Guanajuato, Queretaro, and Hidalgo, the mining centre of the last being Pachuca. It lies on a plain about sixty miles from Mexico City,—a plain covered with maguey plants and environed by the same purple hills that surround the capital, over which peers the wonderful Montaña de los Organos, or Organ Mountain, of Actopan. Enclosed within a semicircle of bare brown hills, by which it is hidden till nearly approached, Pachuca fills a little valley with low walled houses of stone. It has a population of about twenty-five thousand, the great bulk of which are Indian miners. It is, with Tasco, the oldest mining district in Mexico, and it is supposed that the first Spanish settlement was founded near here. Its mines have been worked for over three hundred and fifty years, and here in this very town was discovered the process of amalgamation, in use to-day, by which all the ores dug from the mountain are made to yield up the silver they contain. Yes, more, the very hacienda is still at work, and profitably, in which, in 1557, Señor Medina made that discovery so valuable to Mexico. Señor Medina has passed away, it is presumed.