system, yet how perfectly he was a part of it he soon showed. Rounding a bluff suddenly we caught sight of a man crouching half hidden behind a tree. Our rurale called him and he came, trembling, and trying to hide the green oranges that he had been eating. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
Rurale—Where are you going?
Man—To Oaxaca.
Rurale—Where are you from?
Man—From the port of Manzanillo.
Rurale—You've come a hundred miles out of your way. Nobody ever comes this way who doesn't have business here. What farm did you run away from, anyhow?
Man—I didn't run away.
Rurale—Well, you fall in here.
So we took the man along. Later it was ascertained that he had run away from "San Juan del Rio." The rurale got the ten pesos reward.
At the plantation "San Cristobal" we left the slave gang behind, first having the temerity to shake the hands of the two musicians, whom we never saw again. Alone on the road we found that the attitude of those we met was widely different from what it had been when we were traveling in the company of the ‘‘rurales’’, the agents of the state. The Spanish horsemen whom we encountered did not deign to speak to us, they stared at us suspiciously through half closed eyes and one or two even spoke offensively of us in our hearing. Had it not been for the letter to the presidente in my pocket it would doubtless have been a difficult matter to secure admission to the tobacco plantations of Valle Nacional.
Everywhere we saw the same thing—gangs of emaciated men and boys at work clearing the ground with
