leaning that way, had reduced a considerable proportion of its
inhabitants to the road, where they earned a precarious living--not by
mending it, but by robbing and occasionally cutting the throats of any
travellers whom they could catch.

The track from Vera Cruz to Mexico City runs persistently uphill;
indeed, I think the one place is 7000 feet above the level of the other.
First, there is the hot zone, where the women by the wayside sell you
pineapples and cocoanuts; then the temperate zone, where they offer you
oranges and bananas; then the cold country, in which you are expected
to drink a filthy liquid extracted from aloes called _pulque_, that in
taste and appearance resembles soapy water.

It was somewhere in the temperate zone that we passed a town consisting
of fifteen _adobe_ or mud houses and seventeen churches. The excessive
religious equipment of this city is accounted for by an almost
inaccessible mountain stronghold in the neighbourhood. This stronghold
for generations had been occupied by brigands, and it was the
time-honoured custom of each chieftain of the band, when he retired on
a hard-earned competence, to expiate any regrettable incidents in his
career by building a church in the town dedicated to his patron saint
and to the memory of those whose souls he had helped to Paradise. This
pious and picturesque, if somewhat mediaeval, custom has now come to an
end, as I understand that the Mexican Government caused the stronghold
to be stormed a good many years ago, and put its occupants, to the
number of several hundreds, to the sword.

We were eight in the coach, which was drawn by as many mules--four
merchants, two priests, myself and the lady who afterwards became my
wife. She was a blue-eyed and fair-haired American from New York. Her