Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/564

556 in Webb County, which has an area of fifteen hundred square miles, and lies along the river. Its climate is mild, though trying, and cattle are pastured throughout the year, though only about one tenth the county area is fit for cultivation. The population of the county is about eight thousand, which represents a gain of six thousand in ten years; and its taxable property $2,000,000, or a million and a half more than in 1870. Laredo itself contains about six thousand inhabitants, constantly increasing in number, and the American element yearly gaining on the inert and useless Mexican.

Every town on the Rio Grande has its counterpart on the opposite side of the river, and so there is here a new and an old Laredo. One, the American, is busy, prosperous, progressive; the other, the Mexican, is idle, lifeless, and gone to decay. Yet, notwithstanding that the American Laredo has such an undesirable neighbor, it is advancing with mighty strides, dragging after it the moribund carcass of its sister town, which it is all but resuscitating, in its own efforts to enter into a new and quickening life. It is an American town engrafted upon a Mexican stump, but which might have been a yet more vigorous shoot if it had been a seedling in virgin soil, instead of a nursling with decaying roots.

There are few beautiful buildings in Laredo, but these are ambitious ones, such as the court-house and jail, which cost nearly sixty thousand dollars, and those of the several railways. If I were writing of the Laredo of five years hence, I should speak of handsome and substantial structures, for these are destined to be built. The Mexican character of the town is visible in its plaza and church, the former treeless, and the latter more barren of ornament than is usual in the houses of worship in Catholic Mexico.

The town has a bank, several second-rate hotels and first-rate bar-rooms, many large mercantile houses, an "opera-house," a ten-thousand-dollar school fund, telephones, and water-works, and electric lights in prospective for the very near future. Yet, withal, Laredo is set down in the midst of a landscape that is absolutely heart-rending in its dreariness, and rejoices in a