mutual acquaintances in Mexico, and we asked questions about sugar-planting, and walked about the boiling-house, where the night-gang of brown men were hard at work stirring and skimming at the boiling-pans, and ladling out coarse unrefined sugar into little earthen bowls to cool. This common sugar in bowls is very generally used by the poorer Mexicans. The sugar-boilers were naked excepting a cotton girdle. These men were very strong, and with great powers of endurance, but they did not at all resemble the strong men of Europe with their great muscles standing up under their skin, the men in Michael Angelo’s pictures, or the Farnese Hercules. They are equally unlike the thin wiry Arabs, whose strength seems so disproportionate to their lean little bodies.
The pure Mexican Indian is short and sturdy; and, until you have observed the peculiarities of the race, you would say he was too stout and flabby to be strong. But this appearance is caused by the immense thickness of his skin, which conceals the play of his muscles; and in reality his strength is very great, especially in the legs and thighs, and in the