aily for three or four
months. This natural liquor is then called _agua miel_, or honey water,
but when it has gone through the process of fermentation it becomes
_pulque_. If the plant is left to itself, at about ten years of age
there springs up from the centre of the leaves a tall stem, twelve or
fifteen feet in height, which bears upon its apex clusters of rich
yellow flowers, and then the whole withers and dies,--it never blooms
but once. The maguey plant constituted the real vineyards of the Aztecs,
as well as the tribes preceding them, its product being the drink of the
people of the country long before the days of the Montezumas. At this
writing, over eighty thousand gallons of pulque are consumed daily in
the national capital. It is to be regretted, as we have seen it
announced, that an American company propose to go into the business of
pulque making by the use of improved facilities, claiming that it can be
produced by the use of this machinery at one half the present cost, the
plants being also made to yield more copiously. Of course it will be
adulterated, every intoxicant is, except pulque as at present made from
the maguey by the Indians.

The Mexicans have two other forms of spirituous liquors, namely
_mescal_, which is also prepared from another species of the maguey, by
pressing the leaves in a mill, the juice thus extracted being distilled;
and _aguardiente_, or rum, made from sugar-cane juice. Both of these are
powerful intoxicants. A very valuable and harmless article is thus
sacrificed to make a liquid poison. So in our Middle and Western States
we pervert both barley and rye from their legitimate purposes, and turn
them into whiskey,--liquefied ruin.

Wherever we go among civilized or savage races, in islands or upon
continents, in the frigid North or the melting South, we find man
resorting to some stimulant other than natural food and drink. It is an
instinctive craving, apparently, exhibited and satisfied as surely in
the wilds of Africa, or the South Sea Islands, as by the opium-eating
Chinese, or the brandy-drinking Anglo-Saxons. Every people have sought
some article with which to stimulate the human system. Oftenest this is
a fermented liquor; but various articles have been found to serve the
purpose. The Aztecs, and the Toltecs before them, had the fermented
juice of the maguey plant. The Chinese get their spirituous drink from
rice. People living under the equator distill the saccharine p