inking of nothing at all;" and the
women--old and young--gossip by the hour, in obedience to that
beneficent law of nature which provides that their talk shall increase
inversely in proportion to what they have to talk about. We find this
law attaining to its most complete fulfilment when they shut themselves
up in nunneries, to escape as much as possible from all sources of
worldly interest, and gossip there more industriously than anywhere
else, as we are informed on very good authority.

Like all the other Mexican Indians whose houses we visited, the people
here showed but little taste in adorning their dwellings, their dresses
and their household implements. Beyond a few calabashes scraped smooth
and ornamented with coloured devices, and the blue patterns on the
women's cotton skirts, there was scarcely anything to be seen in the
way of ornament. How great was the skill of the Mexicans in ornamental
work at the time of the Conquest, we can tell from the carved work in
wood and stone preserved in museums, the graceful designs on the
pottery, the tapestry, and the beautiful feather-work; but this taste
has almost disappeared in the country. Just in the same way, contact
with Europeans has almost destroyed the little decorative arts among
most barbarous people, as, for example, the Red Indians and the natives
of the Pacific Islands; and what little skill in these things is left
among them is employed less for themselves than in making curious
trifles for the white people, and even in these we find that European
patterns have mixed with the old designs, or totally superseded them.

The Indians lodged us in an empty cane-hut, where they spread mats upon
the ground, and we made pillows of our saddles. We were soon tired of
looking up at the stars through the chinks in the roof, and slept till
long after sunrise. Then the Indians rafted us across the second river;
and we rode on to Jalapa, having accomplished our horseback journey of
nearly three hundred miles with but one accident, the death of a horse,
the four-pound one. He had been rather overworked, but would most
likely have got through, had we not stopped the last night at the
Indian _ranchos_, where there was no forage but green maize leaves, a
food our beasts were not accustomed to. It seems our men gave him too
much of this, and then allowed him to drink excessively; and next
morning he grew weaker and weaker, and died not long after we reached
Jalapa. Our other