Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/515

Rh people. Every night the great gate is locked, and whatever is behind those stone walls has to stay in, and whatever is outside has to stay out, till morning. Everything on the farm is taken in under cover, not even one of those old wooden ploughs, patterned after the first one Noah patented in the ark, is left in the field; at sunset you will see the laborer driving home with the plough-beam over the yoke, and in the morning he brings it out again. If one of our American ploughs was left in one of these fields over night, it would be taken to pieces and distributed over the country in forty places, and half of it pawned. And as for a harrow, they would n't leave a tooth in it!

"Speaking of ploughs, what do you suppose these brutes do with one of our Yankee ploughs when they get it? Why, the first thing they do is to saw off one handle, and make it as near as possible like their old wooden ones; then they do everything they can think of to break it, and fall back on the wooden institution which they've used a thousand years. It's just a holy terror! Here I am, with a stock of machinery that would set up a first-class establishment in the States, that is just rusting to pieces; and these people are only waiting till I'm tired out, when they expect to get it all for nothing. When you've been amongst 'em a year, as I have, and have seen what sons of Satan they really are, you'll change your mind about 'em. You tourists, who only meet 'em on the street, and see 'em grinning and bowing and shaking hands, and embracing you as though you was a long-lost brother, and telling you their house is yours, and their wives and daughters, and everything they own, is at your disposal, you only see one side of 'em. I've seen both sides. I've tested their hospitality, and have found out that there ain't a bit of the real genuine article in all Mexico."

The horse railways of the city and district have proved quite profitable, a single short line within the city limits paying three per cent a month. There is a long line in course of operation to Matamoras Azucar, a large town in the tierra caliente, distant a day's ride by diligence to the southward. It is a branch from this that runs to Cholula, reaching it in an hour's ride, and at a cost, first-class, of two reales; second-class, fifteen cents. There