Wichita eagle., 1888-06-07

lency and his wife will long be remem-
bered with pleasure by our entire party.
Near the city of Guadalajara is the
town or suburb which produces all the
famed pottery bearing that city g name,
which is reached by a tram-way and to
which we all repaired to load ourselves
down with mugs and jugs, pots and pitch
make the average civilized eye stare. 1t
was with sigh that we next day noon
pulled away from the charming courts,
delightful areas and pleasant resorts, the
beautiful and grand asylums of that
mountain environed city; the brows of
whose people are ever kissed, the flush of
whose cheeks are ever soothed, by the
soft Pacific zephyrs that forever gently
blow around and murmurs through her
bird-byIrthened bowers. To her people
our party constituted a curious show
They SO crowded about our engine and
around our cars on the evening Of our ar
rival that the engineer was forced to
scare them back by blowing off steam.
Later in the evening hundreds of the bet
ter classes came down to ask the privi-
lege of showing their families
through our palace cars. And
when the last bell had been wrung and
the throttle opened a thousand softly
accented adios trembled upon the air.
Speaking of street cars, the Mexican
Central railway have built tramways in
many of the more important cities,
which go winding about through the
narrow streets, pulled by from three to
four mules. hitched up tandem. The
mules have no bells, but the driver
stands in front footing a horn and hiss
ing by turns, which is a signal for the
donkeys and babies to take to the side
walks, for the street car mule is kept on
a dead run. In going down one of these
lines at Zacatecas, which falls three
thousand feet in three miles, the mules
were taken off of our car, which was
left to the chances of gravity locomo-
ton and the brake. There were sixteen
of us in the vehicle, which pitched
merrily around the curves as we flew
down the gradient at break-neck
speed. All at once there was frenZied
footing from our driver and screams
from some Of the ladies who were stand
ing on the front platform. A Mexican
with his wooden wheeled cart, to which
seven mules were attached, was trying
to cross the track. In an instant the
inevitable had occurred. Rose Field, of
the Kansas City Times, who was standing
on the front step of the car was pulled
out from the mules which lay scattered
about under the car and elsewhere, the
dirtiest and most abused looking citizen
ever seen in those parts and with a
sprained knee to boot.
On Wednesday morning our train
pulled up at Aguas Calientes, famous for
its hot springs and great bathing estab-
lishments where bright-eyed maids are
detailed to do the rubbing. In our hunt
for barber Shop we ran into a public
school which consisted of about three
hundred urchins and three or four
teachers all i'll one immense room. The
scholars were all studying or coming
their lessons aloud or audably. So soft
and musical is their language in the
mouths of prattlerS we at first thought it
some kind of chant. AS soon as we
were discovered, however, teachers and
scholars arose to their feet, in silence,
many OF them bowling and smiling as we
disappeared through the court way into
the street. We found our wife waiting
for us in the shade of a monument III
the public square which bore an inscrip-
ton in Roman characters to the effect
that it had been erected in 1900 and
1t was queer affair, its
base resting on the backs of four swans,
the intermediate spaces being occupied
by dog heads.
They have some queer landscape
scenes, together with some mammoth
farming schemes in Mexio. Our train
ran through one great broad valley, all
about over which were thickly scattered
almost innumerable great well sweeps,
which kept bobbing up and down, up
and down in a ridiculously confusing
way, as far as the eye could reach.
There were two men and two buckets
to each sweep and that was the way
that entire valley was being irrigated
and made TO produce-no prayers for
rain or return Of thanks in that COM
munity of bobbers and buckets-you bet.
The poems go with the farms and hacien-
das when sold and some of them contain
thousands of men and women and chill
aren. We ran through one fellows
farm which contained one hundred and
fifty-four thousand acres of wheat which
was being harvested and threshed and
1t took the train nearly half an hour to
run through this one field, and we don't
know that this was the long way of the
field either The dam which turned the
waters of the river into the irrigating
bitches which watered this immense
farm also furnished the power to drive a
dynamo, which developed the electricity
that was conveyed by wire half doz-
Ell miles to light the homes.
houses, barns, yards. stores and
mills of the owner of that
place who reached all the different forces
scattered over his patch by telephone.
The grain Of this country is not put in
bins or cribs, but stored in immense cone
shaped affairs twice as big and three
times as high as hay stack, which are
built of adobe and plastered white, and
which, when filed, arc sealed UP, air
tight, where the grain remains sound for
years or until wanted. Thus do they
store their grain in ovens, stack their fod-