States, and if properly treated become honest and faithful servants, though their ways are difficult to understand. What will be the future of the coloured races in the United States is a very difficult and thorny problem. But it seemed to me both on my first and subsequent visits that in many parts of the Mississippi valley the climate is much better suited to negroes than to white men, and that the mixture of the two races is bad for both.
We stayed only a short time in New Orleans, which, in 1888, was a very different town to what I found in 1919, and on February 23rd set off on our long railway journey to Mexico. The part of Texas which we passed through seemed better settled, by a better class of people—many of them Germans—than Louisiana, and San Antonio was quite a superior town with a very cosmopolitan population of thirty thousand. The streets were full of smart buggies and good stores and the hotel very comfortable. When we left the next day, the tram was delayed for some time by a terrible railway accident caused by the breaking down of one of the light iron bridges over a deep river gorge. When we got to the place we had to leave the train and walk past the wreck of a tram, which had preceded us by a very short time, in which most of the passengers had been killed or seriously injured; we saw the bodies lying by the track and a pile of dead horses not far off. The number of wrecks, as they are called, on the American railways, especially in the South and West, was at that time and for years afterwards very great, partly owing to the carelessness of the railway employees, and partly to the number of wooden bridges, which soon become rotten or are washed out by sudden floods.
Whilst waiting for the train which came to meet us on the other side of the river, I gathered the bulbs of a pretty little white-flowered Amaryllis Cooperia which I keep to this day; but the vegetation of the great plains and of the Canyon of the Rio Grande river, which we passed through in the night by bright moonlight, was at this season very poor. The next day we picked up the coffin of a man who had been shot at a little store close to one of the stations, so that I saw more dead men on this journey than I have ever seen before or since. At El Paso we reached the junction of the Mexican railway and transferred our baggage to another train after passing the Mexican custom house on the other side of the Rio Grande.
Next morning we breakfasted in an old railway-car in the station at Chihuahua, where three weeks before the train had been held up by brigands, who then, as now, were very numerous in the wild country to the west of the line.
The country is rocky and desolate for a long distance, and we were not tempted to accept the invitation of an English ranch owner to stay at his ranch near Santa Rosalia. On the next day we reached the summit of the line at about 8,000 feet near Zacatecas, where there are great silver mines, and on the fourth day from El Paso arrived at the city of Mexico. We found tolerable quarters in the Café Anglais, as there was no good modern hotel in the town at that time. I need not say much about this place, which we left on March 7th in order to meet Godman at Orizaba. It has often been described by better pens than mine, and though in a temperate climate at 6,000 feet above sea-level, it was at that time, owing
