exemption from taxes for the first five
years, free roads and schools, gratuitous seed-corn, farming implements,
etc., to indigent immigrants, and attracted a considerable number of the
very best agriculturists from Tyrol and Southern Switzerland. But after
the collapse of the imperial government a waning moon would have
been the fitter emblem of the Crescent Village: its privileges were
abrogated, and many of the disappointed Bauern returned to their native
countries. Still, the appointment of a few half-Indian officials is the
only positive grievance of the colonists, and the advantages of their
climate and situation might well reconcile them to greater
inconveniences.

At a distance of only sixteen degrees from the equator, the average
temperatures of the coldest and warmest months differ less than spring
and summer in the United States, so that the September weather of
Geneva or Innspruck is here as perennial as a sea-fog in Newfoundland.
During a residence of seven years, Pastor Wenck has chronicled four
thunder-storms, twenty-two common storms, two hoar-frosts (both in
November), one sultry day, and two hundred and eight short showers,
leaving a balance of two thousand two hundred and ninety-two days of
_himmelswetter_,--heaven weather,--as he called it, alternating with
cool nights whose dew indemnifies the fields for the scantiness of the
annual rainfall. Yet the denizens of this Himmel-land come in for a
first-hand share of all the luxuries which a compensating nature has
lavished on the inhabitants of the sweltering Tierra Caliente.

Forty or fifty varieties of tropical fruits come to their tables in
a freshness and sun-ripened sweetness quite unknown to our Northern
markets; their builders may select their material from groves of
mahogany, iron-wood, American ebony, green-heart, euphorbia, and other
timber-trees of the coast swamps; cacao, vanilla, gums, and frankincense
can be bought at half trade prices, and an excursion of ten miles will
take them to a region where the pot-hunter can fill his bag day after
day without fear of ever exhausting the meat-supply, where the
adventurous sportsman may try his luck and the mettle of his dogs, and
where the naturalist can revel in all the wonders of a tropical terra
incognita.

AMONG THE RUINS OF YUCATAN.

JOHN L. STEPHENS.

[The Egypt of America, as one may fairly call the Maya region
of Yucatan, was first brought prominently into notice by Jo