[Illustration:  INDIAN TLACHIQUERO, COLLECTING JUICE OF THE AGAVE FOR PULQUE.]

The fine buildings of the haciendas, and more especially the churches, contrast strongly with the generality of houses, all of one story, built of adobes (mud-bricks dried in the sun), with flat roofs of sand and lime resting on wooden rafters, and the naked ground for a floor, all dark, dirty, and comfortless.  There are even many huts built entirely of the universal aloe.  The stems of wild aloes which have been allowed to flower are stuck into the ground, side by side, and pieces of leaves tied on outside them with aloe-fibre.  These cut leaves are set like tiles to form a roof, and pegged down with the thorns which grow at their extremities.  Picturesque and cheap, though hardly comfortable, for we are in the “tierra fria” now, and the mornings and evenings in winter are often bitterly cold.

But the churches!  Is it possible that they can belong to these wretched filthy little cottages.  As black Sam, our driver, a runaway Texan slave, suggested, it looked as though the villagers might pull down their houses and locate themselves and their families in their churches.  We thought of Mr. Ruskin, who has somewhere expressed an earnest desire that all the money and energy that England has wasted in making railroads, had been spent in building churches; and we wished he had been here to see his principles carried out.

I have travelled on rough roads in my time, but on such a road as this never.  My companion refused for a time to award the premium of badness to our thoroughfare; but, just while we were discussing the question and recounting our experience of bone-smashing highways, we reached a pass where the road consisted of a series of steps, nearly a foot in depth, down which steps we went at a swinging trot, holding on for our lives, in terror lest the next jerk should fairly wrench our arms out of their sockets, while we could plainly hear the inside passengers howling for mercy, as they were shot up against the roof which knocked them back into their seats.  Aching all over, we reached level ground again, and Mr. Christy withdrew his claims, and agreed that no road anywhere else could possibly be so bad as a Mexican road; a decision which later experiences only served to confirm.

Our start, every time we changed horses, was a sight to see.  Nine half-broken horses and mules, in a furious state of excitement, were harnessed to our unwieldy machine; the helpers let go, and off they went, kicking, plunging, rearing, biting, and screaming, into ruts and watercourses that were like the trenches they make for gas-pipes in London streets, with our wheels on one side on a stone wall, and in a pit on the other, and Black Sam leaning back with his feet on the board, waiting with perfect tranquillity until the animals had got rid of their superfluous energy and he could hold them in.  We were always just going to have some frightful accident, and always just missed it.  The last stage before we reached Otumba, a small dusky urchin ran across the road just before us.  How Black Sam contrived to pull up I cannot tell, though, indeed, his arms were about the size of an ordinary man’s thighs; but he did, and they got the child out from the horses’ feet quite unhurt.