at it is there
that Creoles and mestizos predominate, and they are the robbers.

We rode over great beds of gravel, cut up in deep trenches by the
mountain-streams; then along the banks of the river, among plantations
of tobacco, looking like beds of lettuces. As we were riding along the
valley, we saw before us a curious dark cloud, hanging over some fields
near the river. Our men, who had seen the appearance before, recognized
it at once as a flight of locusts, and, turning out of the high-road,
we came upon them just as they had settled on a clump of trees in a
meadow. They covered the branches and foliage until only the outline of
the trees was visible, while the rest of the swarm descended on a green
hedge, and on the grass. As for us, we went and knocked them down with
our riding-whips, and carried away specimens in our hats; but the
survivors took no manner of notice of us, and in about ten minutes they
left the trees mere skeletons, leafless and stripped of their bark, and
moved across the field in a dense mass towards some fruit-trees a
little way off. For days after this, when we met with travellers on the
road, or stopped at the door of a cottage to get a light or something
to drink, and chatted a few minutes with the inhabitants, we found that
our descent of the mountain-pass had brought us into a new set of
interests. News of the government and of the revolutionary party
excited no curiosity,--talk of robbers still less. At every house the
question was, "?_De donde vienen, Senores_?" "Where are you from,
gentlemen?"--and when we told them, "?_Y estaban alli las langostas_?"
"And were the locusts there?" The whole country was being devastated by
them; and the large rewards offered for them to the peasants, though
they caused dead locusts to be brought by tons, seemed hardly to
diminish their numbers. Firing guns had some slight effect in driving
off the swarms of locusts; and in some places the reports of muskets
were to be heard, at short intervals, all day long. Some idea of the
destruction caused by the locusts may be formed from the fact that in
six weeks they doubled the price of grain in the district. Fortunately,
they only appear in such numbers about once in half a century.

We had ridden a hundred miles over a rough country in the last
forty-eight hours, and were glad to get a rest at Orizaba; but on the
morning of the third day we were in the saddle again, accompanied by a
new friend, the English