UNCERTAINTY AND GAMING.
This atmosphere, pure and luminous, full of slumberous breezes in the shade and of debilitating heat in the sunshine, capricious and treacherous, not only has an influence upon the physiology, pathology, and life of the Mexicans, but it gives to much of their labor an unstable character. In fact, as permanent rivers are few in those great plains, and as those which exist are due to rain, the sowings of the rainy season, which are the more important, and their fruition, where there are no rivers, demand rains. But since, on the other hand, deforestation, carried on since the vice-reinal days, has been destructive, not only are lacking forests and groups of trees, which, as thermal centres uniformly distributed over the higher plateau, might give shelter to the sowings against the chill of night and early morning, or which, in the guise of fences of foliage, might intercept the cold blasts of northers; but also, through their lack, rains have become rare and irregular, there being regions where they have failed for six, seven, and eight consecutive years; as happened in the Mezquital of the state of Hidalgo, the Llano district of Chihuahua, and the north of the state of Nuevo Leon in the years 1887 to 1895. In 1892 and 1893 the drought was general and desolated a great part of the Central Plateau.
When the season of rains arrives, the fields are transformed in a single week, and where was a barren and arid horizon, there extends itself a mantle of tender verdure with corn-fields and springing wheat, which from day to day develop, open their spikes to the sun, and seem to cast back to it its last rays, as golden oceans, ruffled by the evening breeze. The laborers busy themselves in guarding them; but an unseasonable hailstorm destroys them, or a blast, sudden and nocturnal, from the north freezes them in the very months of August and September; that is to say, when surrounded by summer haze, or under a cloud sprinkled with twinkling stars, the laborers believe their crops secure and slumber, lulled by the most pleasing anticipations. When they wake the corn is