zapotes and mameis, nisperos and granaditas, tamarinds and fresh sugar-canes. These people are walking with their loads thirty or forty miles to market: but their race have been used as beasts of burden for ages, and they don’t mind it.
Bright blue and red birds, and larger and more brilliant butterflies than are seen in Europe, show that, though we are among fields of wheat and maize, we are in the tropics after all. As the road rises we get views of the broad valley, with its lakes and green meadows, and the great white haciendas with their clumps of willows, their church-towers, and the clusters of adobe huts surrounding them—like the peasants’ cottages in feudal Europe, crowding up to the baron’s castle.
Our mules begin to flag as we toil up the steep ascent; but the conductor rattles the stones in his black bag, and as the ominous sound reaches their ears, they start off again with renewed vigour. We pass San Mateo, a village of charcoal-burners, where a large and splendid stone church, with its tall dark cypresses, stands among the huts of reeds and pine-shingles that form the village.