Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/633

 inch under cultivation. The Indian farmers were peacefully ploughing, with wooden ploughs, driving their teams four abreast, and leaving behind them furrows such as might be made by dragging a sharpened stick of timber over the ground. Yet their acres were broad and free from weeds, and smiling, beneath the glorious sun of Northern Mexico, in cotton, tobacco, corn, and cane, intermixed with desirable fruits, such as apples, quinces, and peaches. They lived, to be sure, in mud hovels, mere boxes of adobe brick, hardly ten feet high by twenty square; but these huts are cool in summer and warm in winter; and what more does man want, in this climate of perpetual sunshine? The springs themselves lie under a cream-colored bluff, about fifty feet in height, from which they come pouring out, to the number of six, some smelling of sulphur, others of sulphuretted hydrogen, and all of them hot. Each one is guided into an adobe pen, or mud hut, about ten Feet square, and in the mud floor of which a hole is sunk about six feet by three. An attendant living in another mud hovel furnishes you with a towel and a sheet, and then you take your choice of an arsenic, a sulphur, an iron, or a magnesia spring, or of another in which all these elements are compounded, with a resultant stench that is completely overpowering, even in this land of evil odors.

A romantic history pertains to these springs; but their future is of more importance than their past, just now, for the railroad company, with that liberal policy and foresight which have characterized the managers of the Atchison system, purposes to make of Santa Eulalia a watering-place second to none south of Las Vegas in New Mexico. There is a good deal in these springs besides water, and there is little doubt that a hotel will take the place of the present ill-conditioned quarters, within the space of a few years.

The valley of the Rio Florida is reputed the richest in Chihuahua, yet there were but three haciendas in sight in a run of forty miles. They, indeed, were almost boundless in extent, as measured by the eye, and their acequia, or irrigating canal, was nearly fifty miles in length; many a league of waste land, covered originally with mesquit, was being reclaimed through