le glittering with silver, every
inch a planter. He welcomed us hospitably, and we sat down together in
the cloister looking out on the courtyard. Evening was closing in, and
all at once the church-bell rang. Crowds of Indian labourers in their
white dresses came flocking in, hardly distinguishable in the twilight,
and the sound of their footsteps deadened as they walked over the dry
stubble that covered the ground. All work ceased, every one uncovered
and knelt down; while, through the open church-doors, we heard the
Indian choir chanting the vesper hymn. In the haciendas of Mexico every
day ends thus. Many times I heard the Oracion chanted at nightfall, but
its effect never diminished by repetition, and to my mind it has always
seemed the most impressive of religious services.

Then the Administrador seated himself behind a great book, and the
calling over the "raya" began. Every man in turn was called by name,
and answered in a loud voice, "I praise God!;" then saying how much he
had earned in the day, for the Administrador to write down. "Juan
Fernandez!"--"_Alabo a Dios, tres reales y medio_:" "I praise God, one
and ninepence." "Jose Valdes!"--"I praise God, eighteen pence, and
sixpence for the boy;" and so on, through a couple of hundred names.

Then came, not unacceptably, a little cup of pasty chocolate and a long
roll for each of us. Then Don Guillermo and our host talked about their
mutual acquaintances in Mexico, and we asked questions about
sugar-planting, and walked about the boiling-house, where the
night-gang of brown men were hard at work stirring and skimming at the
boiling-pans, and ladling out coarse unrefined sugar into little
earthen bowls to cool. This common sugar in bowls is very generally
used by the poorer Mexicans. The sugar-boilers were naked excepting a
cotton girdle. These men were very strong, and with great powers of
endurance, but they did not at all resemble the strong men of Europe
with their great muscles standing up under their skin, the men in
Michael Angelo's pictures, or the Farnese Hercules. They are equally
unlike the thin wiry Arabs, whose strength seems so disproportionate to
their lean little bodies.

The pure Mexican Indian is short and sturdy; and, until you have
observed the peculiarities of the race, you would say he was too stout
and flabby to be strong. But this appearance is caused by the immense
thickness of his skin, which conceals the play of his muscles; and in