Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/352

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340
OUR NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR.

population. The rest, as in all the pueblos, or towns, find their little livelihood as they can, carrying burdens, driving mules, here a very little, and there still less.

The grand house at the hacienda of Goral is elaborate enough for a castle or a convent, the two biggest things in this country. Its high front wall is set off with square pink blocks of water-color, and it looks big enough for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth and her retinue. The contrast between this palace and the clay-colored adobe huts about it is painful, though it is universal outside of the United States, but nowhere else more violent and extreme than here.

The fields lie wide and magnificent before it; but the fields are not for the tillers. For a real a day or thereabouts they work and starve; for nothing a day this gentleman idles and abounds. I think some of the most scared anti-agrarians would be almost as fanatical and wise as Wendell Philips, the wisest man as well as the most eloquent of his generation, could they but look on these Mexican pictures. How much better are the huge manufacturing corporations, and railroad monopolies, and land-grabbers of the United States? Take heed in time, and let Christianity have its perfect work, or antichristianity will have its.

Curious grain vaults are on its plaza, pyramids or cones built of mortar, thirty feet high, for the storing of the harvests. The reason for this shape I did not learn. They give a quaint air to the plaza. A school and two churches and a half-dozen begging old women help break up the monotony of scenery and silence of this grand farm-house. The lordly owner ought at least to take care of his own paupers, and not allow them to prey on the traveler.

The wild wood, after leaving this posta, soon gets inclosed in a wall on the right hand, too high for us in the coach to see whether it be still a forest, or has become a fruitful field. It is a part of two haciendas in name, and one in fact, that stretch all this posta and beyond, from four to five leagues, from ten to twelve miles. The wall is admirably built of stone well capped, or of adobe brick, its only fault being that it is too high for our heads. Glimpses oc-