true Yankee fashion, about the coach. The town is half Mexican, half American. Open fields and open windows show the Northerner is here. Adobe houses and blank walls and big coach doors show the Mexican is here also. England and Spain meet and mingle on the outskirts of either realm.
A pull till four, through like expressionless country, brings us to Comargo, the Rio Bravo, and the end of Mexico, though thirty-six hours still remain between being on the one bank and on the other of the Grand and Brave river. This border town is the cleanest and dullest of all between Monterey and Matamoras. An inlet of the Rio Grande, quite a stream, puts up behind the town, and is crossed by a tedious ferriage. The steep bank is pulled up, and the broad plaza stretches out, a third of a mile almost. At its upper end are Government buildings, spacious, pretty, and cool. At its lower end is a covered market, an unseen sight farther inland, swept, garnished, and empty. A few stores inclose the square on its two sides parallel with the two rivers. Here I get my last packet of silver, and the coach proceeds in the gathering sunset hours down the banks of the river. Its waters are not seen, but I know they are only a mile or so away, and that that Northern sky is over the land of my fathers and my faith.
The trees grow large, the fields are open and cultivated. Every thing is American and fascinating. No matter how much we may admire foreign sights, home sights are ever the tenderer and lovelier. Brilliant Mexico, with its magnificent volcanoes, barrancas, and haciendas; its wonderful flowering and fruit; its orange orchards and banana groves and maguey prairies; its ancient piles and its modern—all are forgotten in the familiar landscape of this semi-northern river. It is near midnight ere we reach our last rancho for the night, La Antigua Renosa.
The rancho is, like its creator man, susceptible of progress. These three nights have demonstrated this. Each good as compared with fears and with maledictions, the present and last is the best. A dozen new chairs of Yankee make, hard-bottomed, brown-painted, arE arranged around the room, as if they were expecting a prayer-
