dred and fifty miles to see naught. It was as if one going to Albany from New York should have gone round by Springfield, except that this was all stage-riding, rough and tedious.
But duty called, and I obeyed. "Per aspera ad astra" I tried to make my motto, through hard places to the heavenly. But it turned out, as is so often the case when we fancy we have a big cross to take up, on taking it up, we find it no cross at all.
The road was smooth and level as oil. Only where it crossed a dry brook, or where the coachman took the paved centre instead of the soft sides, which he did occasionally, was there any approach to rockness. The day was splendid, cloudy, and coolish; the scenery was grand: a prairie a hundred miles long, and half that in width, with mountains ever inclosing the vision. The fields were almost all under cultivation. Irrigation gave them a green and gladsome look. The alfalfa, or lucern, was the greenest of the green. Wheat, barley, maize, and chilli were growing luxuriantly.
Celaya was our first large and pretty town, some forty miles from Queretaro. A landlord, very bland and child-like in his smile, told me the city had a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants. "Twelve thousand," I suggested. "No, señor; one hundred and twenty thousand." I wrote down the figures, "12,000;" he corrected them to "120,000." Somebody blundered; for the driver said there were not over eight thousand. Another traveler says there are twenty-five thousand. Perhaps he meant Leon, for which I was aiming.
The market-place was full of flowers. They sell large bouquets of roses, tulips, and other flowers for a tlaqua (three-fourths of a cent). This is the only Indian name used in the currency, and was the bottom cent, an eighth of a real, until the centavos appeared, a tenth of a dime, and the new baby displaced the old one. Still the old dies hard, and every thing is sold by the tlaqua, and not the centavo.
In the middle of the prairie, where we changed horses, a woman had made a tent of a cactus, and was busy rolling, patting, and frying her tortillas, putting upon them a small spoonful of beans and
