put the hot and mellifluous "Iliad" into his cold blank (very) verse, when Longfellow was alive, who could do it into English hexameters as honeyed and galloping as its own Greek! Why will he not give his next ten years to this Conquest of Troy? But I have got a long way from my quotation in my dissertation. It may seem tame to give it now. Yet here it is:
"Into the Sweet-water valley precipitate leaps the Nebraska."
Our Indian words are as good as the Greek, and Longfellow has handled them as deftly. So we were precipitated into the beautiful Valley of San Juan, and flew through the streets of a large town of that name, halting short at the hotel in the plaza, and there resting.
A dissertation on beggars may as well come in here as anywhere. Beggars are an institution in Mexico, the most developed of almost any one of her institutions. They are especially so in the outer settlements, but few of them being seen in the city, where the police represses them. They have graced every station on our route. The most finished specimens of this class I have seen were at Cuernervaca. As I was leaving my dining-room, a gentleman met me at the door, dressed in a faded but cleanly suit, not unlike a retired clerk, or a superannuated preacher. He spoke low and courteous. I listened, but could not understand, and turned to a companion, and asked him what this gentleman wished. He listened a moment. "Only a beggar!" was his translation. I was shocked, or would have been, but that in my solicitations for help of feeble churches and Christian causes, I had been myself often called by that contemptuous name. So I put this gentleman among the clergy, and gave him what we get on such occasions—a smile, but no shilling.
Returning from a walk amidst the gardens of that delicious spot, a smiling lady of seventy or seventeen—her smile was of the latter age, certainly—met us, and beamed on us; asked us if we had been in the flower gardens (our hands full of bouquets showed that); inquired if we stopped at the Hotel Diligencias; and then prettily put
