dancers, drinkers, and dissipaters of every sort. To-day it is as empty as a Protestant church on week-days. A sluggish canal girds it, covered thick with green scum, which, but for the height of the land, would breed a deadly miasma. As it is, the tropical vegetation goes on harmlessly, and, once used to the sight of it, not disagreeably.
Twelve comes, and a pulqui train also. Said train is a heavy line of freight cars, two stories high, with barrels of the detestable drunk-drink of the country piled close in each compartment. The company makes its chief profits out of this business, and so every body and every train have to give way to its demands.
We wait till three before we start, tacked on to these empty pulqui cars. The engine gives out, and leaves us forty miles out, itself or its engineer overcome with pulqui. Delay follows delay, as one sin breeds another, until it is after four in the morning ere we reach Puebla, where we should have been at seven the previous evening. The cars are not made for night travel, nor our clothes. The night is cool, and our capes are light; the windows of the cars will not stay up, and, all open to their uttermost, let in the sharp air of the snow mountains. We shiver, and seek to sleep. The earth shivers too, either in sympathy or from some other cause, and quite a quaking occurs at three o'clock, sufficient to send the people of Puebla out of their beds and chambers. Our shakes from cold were so great as to make us insensible to the responsive shiverings of the earth. At five we get to our hotel, and under blankets, and into warmth and sleep.
Puebla lies on the opposite side of the snow range from Mexico. Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl are west of us here, east there. They are closer here, it being only about half the distance, or thirty miles, to the chief of these from this city, while that Popo, etc., is sixty miles from Mexico.
Our hotel was once a college or theological school, and has over the graceful iron gate-way that opens on the second, and properly hotel balcony, the unusual initials, "I. H. S."—unusual for an inn. "Jesus, the Saviour of men," has at last found his name over the
