remely handsome, the majority
are very homely, ill-formed, and negligent of person. The best looking
among the peons lose their comeliness after a few years, owing to hard
labor, childbirth, and deprivations. Few women retain their good looks
after twenty-five years or until they are thirty. Another fact was
remarked, that these Indian men and women never laugh. The writer was
not able to detect even a smile upon the faces of the lower grade of
natives; a ceaseless melancholy seems to surround them at all times, by
no means in accordance with the gay colors which they so much affect. In
contrast to the hovels of the populace, one sees occasionally a small
garden inclosed with a high adobe wall, belonging to some rich mine
owner, in which the tall pomegranate, full of scarlet bloom, or a
stately pepper tree, dominates a score of others of semi-tropical
growth.

One practice was observed at Zacatecas which recalled far-away Hong
Kong, China. This was the prosecution of various trades in the open air.
Thus the shoemaker was at work outside of his dwelling; the tailor, the
barber, and the tinker adopted the same practice, quite possible even in
the month of March in a land of such intense brightness and sunshine. We
wandered hither and thither, charmed by the novelty and strangeness of
everything; not an object to remind one of home, but only of the far
East. The swarthy natives with sandaled feet, the high colors worn by
the common people, the burnous-like serape, the sober unemotional
manners of the peons, the nut-brown women with brilliant eyes and
half-covered faces, the attractive fruits, the sharp cries of the
venders, the Egyptian-shaped pottery,--surely this might be Damascus or
Cairo.

An excursion by tramway was made to the neighboring town of Guadalupe,
six or eight miles away, nearly the entire distance being a sharp down
grade, over which the cars pass at top speed by their own gravitation;
no animals are attached. So steep is the descent that it may be compared
to a Canadian toboggan slide. It requires six mules to draw each car
back again, the animals being harnessed three abreast like the horses in
the Paris and Neapolitan omnibuses. Though this tramway is now admitted
to be an indispensable adjunct to the business of the place, when it was
first resolved upon by some of the residents more enterprising than
their neighbors, it was considered to be a serious innovation, open to
great objections, the local p