Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/578

570 the mysterious third party, whom the police—a squad at that time being in our very court—were anxiously looking for; but doubtless before another sun had set Texas had claimed another recreant citizen.

Many of the frontier settlements of Mexico are yet in the condition of that Western colony which hung a tinker for an offence of the blacksmith,—because there were two tinkers in town and but one son of Vulcan. Policy plays a most important part in the decisions of justice; and hence it is that the Mexican army is full of red-handed murderers, who have only escaped being shot by shouldering muskets and becoming themselves defenders of the laws.

In an enumeration of the attractions of Monterey I should not forget the Plaza of Zaragoza, with its fountain and flowers, with the municipal palace on one side, and the cathedral on the other. In the palace are still shown three of the muskets with which Maximilian was shot, and other curiosities. The market building, the Parian, towers above just such a mat-covered pavement as is described in my chapter on the markets of Mexico, with filthy women and miserable men crouched beneath frail tula shelters, and guarding contemptible collections of fruit and vegetables. With an escort, ladies might visit the bishop's palace, now gone to decay and used as military quarters, the Campo Santo, or cemetery, and the "house in the tree," where a small structure is perched in the branches of a giant ceiba.

The bull-ring of Monterey is merely an enclosure of poles, so frail that an animal of spirit could demolish it in a single furious charge; not an amphitheatre such as we find in the federal district. Neither are there here any genuine Andalusian bullfighters, imported from Spain, as in the capital, who rarely fail to drive the rapier straight to the spinal marrow; nor was my blood stirred by the rabble in Monterey as it was at the first bull-fight I saw in Mexico, under the shadow of the hill of Chapultepec. As for another Mexican institution, the cock-pit, it is nothing more than a circular shed with thatched and pointed roof.

South from Monterey a diligence formerly ran to the city of Mexico; but the constantly advancing railroad has pushed its