of Guadalupe are to be found all over the
country, the Virgin of Guadalupe being the adopted patron saint of
Mexico. Along the main road or causeway leading from the capital to the
hill of Guadalupe,--now given up to the use of the Vera Cruz
Railway,--one sees tall stone shrines which were erected long ago,
before which deluded pilgrims and penitents knelt on their way thither.
These were intended to commemorate the twelve places at which the
Saviour fell down on his journey while bearing the cross to Calvary. It
was called the road of humiliation and prayer, over which devotees crept
on their hands and knees, seeking expiation for their sins, instigated
by priestly suggestions and superstitious fears. Over this causeway,
Maximilian, actuated by his fanatical religious devotion, and by a
desire to impress the popular mind, walked barefooted from the city
walls to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe! The hold of the priests
on the Mexican people to-day is confined almost entirely to the peons
and humble laborers. It is a common saying that when a peon earns two
dollars he gives one dollar and forty-five cents to the priest, spends
fifty cents for pulque, and supports his family on the remaining five
cents. Among the educated classes the men are beginning to refuse to
permit their wives and daughters to attend the confessional, the most
subtle and portentous agency for evil that was ever invented, which has
contaminated more innocence and destroyed more domestic happiness than
any other known cause.

The tramway which runs out to the Viga Canal takes one a couple of miles
into an extremely interesting region, exhibiting many novel phases of
native life. The thoroughfare runs beside the canal for a considerable
distance, the banks of which are shaded here and there by drooping
willows and rows of tall Lombardy poplars. How old the canal is, no one
can say; it certainly antedates the period of the Conquest. The
straw-thatched, Indian, African-looking town of Santa Anita is a
curiosity in itself, surrounded by the floating islands, which we are
soberly told did really float centuries ago. "Here they beheld," says
Prescott, "those fairy islands of flowers, overshadowed occasionally by
trees of considerable size, rising and falling with the gentle
undulations of the billows." One does not like to play the _role_ of an
iconoclast, but probably these islands were always pretty much as they
are to-day. The "floating" idea is a