been a failure), I might have got up a little excitement over this apparition. As it is, I calmly await its coming. It proves to be a wood-carrier, and the coffin is a length of corded wood, lashed together in a symmetric and solid shape, and stretching out its eight or ten feet, two feet in width, a burden not easily to be borne, one is sure, though these men, old and young, seem to carry it lightly. They bend under it, and take a staff to stay their steps down the headlong descent. They, however, have erectness enough to recognize us, and give and get grateful "Adios." The charcoal burners follow the fagot bearers. There are degrees in every thing. A fagot is less than a straight stick, but above a chip and a knot. The latter go into coal, which goes down behind its aristocratic kinsman.
"Every thing's nothing except by position."
They are compactly and prettily arranged. Bound together with nets and with wisps of green grass, arranged along the level side, which is laid against the back, they look ornamental even, and make the charcoalist a florist. Why not? His stuff is diamonds in disguise. Why should not its arrangement be crystalline?
The rise of the sun and of the path set the city below, and the mountains above, and the plains beyond in clearer light. The town, romantic from every point, is not the least so from this hill-top looking down. It is waking up, too, and the sound comes up hither of the crushing mills grinding the rocks into powder, of the water washing the powder into mud, of the mules treading the mud into chemical mire, and of the furnaces evolving the chemicals, and burning the white metal out of its ancient, and as it perhaps had thought, eternal, companions. The street-cries, the rattling carts, the living man awakening from his death, and coming out of his grave the same that he went in—all these salute us with the breaking of the light over the mountains; at least so far as these sounds can reach the ever-ascending sense.
Not far to the west, on one of the peaks, lies a white cluster, called the Mineral de la Luz, or Luz alone, as these Yankeeized Mexicans cut it down. It is a famous mine, not now in its best
