V.
ON THE STAGE.
Our Companions.—Vain Fear.—The Plunge.—Coffee Haciendas.—Peon Life.—Orizaba City.—The Mountain-lined Passway.—The Cumbres.—The Last Smile of Day and the Hot Lands.—Night and Useless Terror.—"Two-o'clock-in-the-morning Courage."—Organ Cactus.—Sunrise.—The Volcano.—Into Puebla and the Cars.—The three Snow-peaks together.—Epizaco.—Pulqui.—"There is Mexico!"
Behold us at Fortin, paying eleven dollars for our stage fare to Puebla, and three more, lacking a quarter, for three valises of moderate weight; eating a hasty plate of soup and nice cutlets, with fried slips of potatoes, washed down with Mexican coffee, which is usually first-rate; not so here. "Stage is ready!" jabbers in Spanish a brown boy. All boys are brown here.
Our seats are taken in a Concord coach made in Mexico, a big, tough, lumbering, easy affair when the roads are easy; when they are rough, it jolts and jumps as if the spirit of the paving-stones inspired it with their madness when they are whirled by a mob. But it is made to stand the jumping as well as the rocks that rock it, and tosses its human contents as unconcernedly as a juggler his balls. There are only five passengers, the first giving out of the dismal programme so faithfully served up to the affrighted appetite. These five men were the two Yankees, who, of course, had neither garlic nor tobacco about them, though one of them smoked all the time, but they were the best of cigars, and three Mexican gentlemen, on their travels to see the inauguration, one a son of a senator from Yucatan, and one an archæologist, and his friend, a light, German-looking gentleman, who had just been exploring the regions of Ixmail, which Stephens has so well described and illustrated. So the second terror disappears. The gentry chat freely
