Litchfield enquirer., 1877-05-31

chiefly taken in Mexican farms; ;some small and carelessly titled; others large and as we'll cultivated as the Mexican methods admit. The landis rich, and when the rail road opens up amarket for it's produce, these farms will become very valuable. We passed many I Mexicaug aaplow- ing in their sleepz alam nllpg; fashion. One good-natured fellow showed us his blow. and only laughed at our raillery about its primitive fashion. It looked like the invention of some ship. wrecked man. in forgotten age. It was simply long pole with clumsy, triang- ular wooden keel nailed on one end of 1t; this scratched the earth lightly, perhaps inbecile instrument was drawn by two oxen and the mans only way of guiding them was by rope tied to the nearest horn of the near OK. ss43t o4 3gs 2 a3-e.s
 Lur road followed the river line closely. The banks were rich and green; thiekets of cottonwoods and willows were just bursting into leaf; now and then we climb. ed up on fine plateaus. with broken table lands, GO ''mesas, stretching away to the right and covered with pinon-trees. On these were herds of cattle and focks of sheep, each tended bv a herder. You would take this herder, as he lies on the ground. for bundle of cast off rags somebody had left behind: but as you drive past the rags futter little, 3 brown face appears slowly lifted, and lazy gleam of curiosity shoots out from two shining black eyes. The rags are man or a boy. g. q.
 "Oh, how do they live2" exclaimed. 'sWhat poverty stricken creatures
 ''Live!'' replied the driver. Give a Mexican five cents and he'll lie by and do nothing, he'll squat on his heels and chew pinon nuts from morning till night Last year, though. they did have hard time; the grasshoppezs cleaned them out. They had nothing left to live on but chita Ia fiery red pepper. They had enough of that. Even the grasshoppers won't eat chiti." 1elst.s el4ss4--a.s.sl,. came to handful of frame houses scat- tered along the creek and conspicous among the ight-green cottonwood trees. Close on the bank shone out new pine meeting house. ''And Baptist, at that, '' said the driver. with iudiciously balanc- ed infection on the Sat that" which might have left us amiable, whatever our predlections as to religions. This was a settlement of Georgians,-''all Baptists' and at a great sacrifice they had built this meeting house. Just beyond the Baptist meeting house lies the farm of an old Virginian, a man of education and re- inement, who for some inexplicable req son buried himself in this wilderness twenty-five years ago. when it swarmed with Indians He so feared that white men and civilization would find him out, that. whenever it was necessary for him to go to some trading post, he went in and out of his hiding place by different houses and with his horse shoes reversed that he might not leave trail which could be followed. There was one inter val of eleven years, he told me, in which he did not see the face of white woman. He still. lives alone; Mexican man with his wife are his only servants; but his ranch is favorite rendezvous for trrvellers, and in few weeks the whistle of the steam-engine will resound through hls lands. So useless is it for man on this continent to flee civilization.
 It grew no easier to find the where. abouts of the engineers Everybody had seen them; nobody knew where they were. We were twenty miles from Walsenburgh | uuopa ~vaa at hand. orr guide had no far ther device to suggest; Earlys had been his last hope; we were. at Early's now. and neither in the log cabin nor in the new ''store'' could any news be had of the en- gineers. Very reluctantly we were turn | ing to retrace our twenty bootless miles, when with a low chuckle our driver ex. claimed By Jingoes, if that ain't luck
 There they be now" ... '.There they were, to be sure. twelve l in number. laughing, shouting, clattering down hilli gay painted wagon, coming to Early's for their nooning. Keen-eyed, bronze faced, alert looking fellows they were: painter might have been delight ed to paint them, as few moments later, they flung themselves on the ground in g picturesque circle. As bronzed, as blis- tered, as hungry, as alert as any of them was the young Frenchman who three | months before had seen nothing in life severer than the Ecole Polytechnique, ol less polished than the saloons of Paris and Washington. It is marvel how such men "take'' to wild life in the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps 1t is only the highly civilized who can appreciate the delight: of savagery. Certain 1t is that there are no men in Colorado who so enjoy living | potatoes, and hunting their meat, as dc the sons and nephews of dukes and earls
 Our road back to Walsenburgh lay ol plateaus which overlooked the river inter
 val ID which we had come. The land wal l less fertile than in the meadows, but tho l opens were grand and breezy, with exhil 1 arating off-looks to the north and south We crossed the wagon road which lead :.,Aa |, Iakw Tn& nTNf and saw creeping along in a yellow
 bound on the pilgrimage to tha shrine of silver,--eleyen white-teppet
 wagons; with ten mules to each wagon
 hardly seemed to advance, its motion looked like the undulating motion of 1 huge dark snake with white rings around
 it's body. In few weeks these white top ped wagons will have disappeared iron seen the swift vanishing smoke of stea m
 engines doing in ten hours the work fo
 which the mule took ten days.
 A few miles out of Walsenburgh l sas
 on bare hill to the right of our road
 strange opject which looked as if a, vesse
 had been thrown up there ages ago. .an'
 lain bleaching till her timbers had slowl
 fallen apart. never saw cast up on an
 shore ghastlier. more weather-beat
 wreck than this seemed, l gazed at
 with increasing perplexity, which our dri
 yer observed, and following the direction of my eyes exclaimed, 'sOh, there the,
 are! Those are the crosses the Penitente
 carry at Easter. They keep 'em stacke,
 up here on this hill, and there wouldn'
 living creature dare 50 much as to touc
 one of them nor to go past them withou
 crossing themselves" As we drove near
 CT, their sem blance to a wrecked vesse
 lessened, but the symbolic significance Q the likeness deepened; there were eleve
 of them, some of them nine or ten fee
 long: nine were lying on the ground
 overlapping each other. with their gra
 bars stretching upward: the other tw
 were planted firm and erect in the ground
 The sight of them gave to the narrative (
 the Penitentes a reality and an intensit which nothing else could have done. Tn , gaunt and rigid arms seemed lifted in az
 peal and their motionless silence scene as pregnant with woe, as cry.
 The sun was just sinking behind tE