be carried far to
market.

In the question of the population of Mexico, one begins to speculate
why--in a country with a splendid climate, a fertile soil, and almost
unlimited space to spread in, the inhabitants do not increase one-half
so fast as in England, and about one-sixth as fast as their neighbours
of the United States. One of the most important causes which tend to
bring about this state of things is the impossibility of conveying
grain to any distance, except by doubling and trebling its price. The
disastrous effects of a failure of the crop in one district cannot be
remedied by a plentiful harvest fifty miles off; for the peasants,
already ruined by the loss of their own harvest, can find neither money
nor credit to buy food brought from a distance at so great an expense.
Next year may be fruitful again, but numbers die in the interval, and
the constitutions of a great proportion of the children never recover
the effects of that one year's famine.

We left the regular road and struck up still higher into the hills,
riding amongst winding roads with forest above and below us, and great
orchids of the most brilliant colours, blue, white, and crimson,
shining among the branches of the oak-trees. The boughs were often
breaking down with the bulbs of such epiphytes; but as yet it was early
in the season, and only here and there one was in flower. At the top of
the hill, still in the midst of the woods, is the Desierto, "the
desert," the place we had selected for our noon-day halt. There are
many of these Desiertos in Mexico, founded by rich people in old times.
They are a kind of convent, with some few resident ecclesiastics, and
numbers of cells for laymen who retire for a time into this secluded
place and are received gratuitously. They spend a week or two in prayer
and fasting, then confess themselves, receive the sacrament, and return
into the world. The situation of this quiet place was well chosen in
the midst of the forest, and once upon a time the cells used to be full
of penitents; but now we saw no one but the old porter, as we walked
about the gardens and explored the quadrangle and the rows of cells,
each with a hideous little wood-cut of a martyr being tortured, upon
the door.

Thence we rode down into the plain, looking down, as we descended, upon
a hill which seemed to be an old crater, rising from the level ground;
and then our path lay among broad fields where oxen were ploughing, and
across