e.

San Antonio de Abajo is a quaint little village, frequented by
muleteers and smugglers. Tobacco, the principal contraband article, is
grown in the plains just below; and, once carried up into the paths
among the mountains, it is hard for any custom-house officer to catch
sight of it.

When there was a government, there used sometimes to be fighting
between the revenue-officers and the smugglers; but now, if there is a
meeting, a few dollars will settle the disputed question to the
satisfaction of both parties, so that the contraband trade, though
profitable, is by no means so exciting as it used to be.

On the road towards San Antonio we saw ancient remains in the banks by
the road-side, but had no time for a regular examination. We slept on
damp mattresses in a room of the inn, where the fowls roosted on the
rafters above our heads, and walked over our faces in the early morning
in an unpleasant manner. We started before daybreak, and a descent down
a winding road, through a forest of pines and oaks, brought us by seven
in the morning from the region of pines and barley down to the district
where tobacco and the sugar-cane flourish, at the level of 3,000 to
4,000 feet above the sea.

We met a jaunty-looking party in the valley, two women and five or six
men, all on good horses, and dressed in the extreme of fashion which
the Mexican _ranchero_ affects--broad-brimmed hats with costly gold and
silver serpents for hat-bands, and clothes and saddles glittering with
silver. Martin rode up to us as they passed, and said he knew them well
for the boldest highwaymen in Mexico. Had we started an hour or two
later we should have met them in the forest, and have had an adventure
to tell of. As it was, the descent of three thousand feet had brought
us from a land of thieves to a region where highway robbery is never
known, unless when a party from the high lands come down on a marauding
expedition. It is an unquestionable fact that the Mexican robbers,
whose exploits have become a matter of world-wide notoriety, all belong
to the cold region of the plateaus, the _tierra fria_. Once down in the
_tierra templada_, or the _tierra caliente_, the temperate or the hot
regions, you hear no more of them; or at least this is the case in the
parts of Mexico we visited. The reason is clear; it is only on the
plateaus that the whites, preferring a region where the climate was not
unlike that of Castile, settled in large numbers; so th