a.

The time allotted for my visit to Jalapa had come to a close. I took
out the ticket, endorsed _Escala donde le convengo_, which I
translated--"Let him stop when, where, and as long as he pleases," and
once more took my seat in the stage, which, on a fine afternoon, was
starting for Perote upon the table-land. This short journey lay across
the mountain of Perote, passing over an elevation of 10,400 feet, the
highest elevation that a stage-coach has yet reached, and one from
which the traveler can oftentimes enjoy a view of all the vegetable
"kingdoms of the world in a moment of time." I took my seat upon the
top of the coach, above the driver, that I might enjoy a last lingering
look at this Nature's paradise, before the mountain-ridge should
intervene between the world I had left behind, and the great salt
desert that we were soon to traverse.

The prospect from the coach-top, as we traveled onward, was even more
beautiful than that I have already described. For several miles beyond
Jalapa we were descending and passing through one of those valleys of
which the Spanish poets so often sing, where the roadside is covered
with a profusion of the flowers and vegetation that flourish only in
the most luxuriant soil. The valley was soon passed, and we began to
ascend so rapidly, that before an hour had passed we could mark the
changing vegetation, and observe the products of a colder climate; for
this changing vegetation is a barometer, which, in Mexico, marks the
ascent and descent as regularly as the most nicely-adjusted artificial
instrument. So accurately are the stratas of vegetation adjusted to the
stratas of the atmosphere which they inhabit, as to lead the traveler
to imagine that a gardener's hand had laid out the different fields
which here rise one above another upon the side of the mountain that
constitutes the eastern inclosure of the table-land. The fertility of
the soil did not seem to diminish; it was only the character of the
vegetation that changed step by step, as we wound our way up toward the
summit of the Perote.

MOUNTAIN VIEW.

We changed horses at La Hoya, a place memorable in the annals of civil
war, as the spot where General Rincon blocked up the pass when Santa
Anna was retiring in 1845, a fugitive from the country. Here the road
becomes so steep as to induce the traveler to walk a little, for the
better opportunities he can thus have of surveying the novel sights
that present themselv