[3] The mortality from smallpox in Mexico is alarming. Three weeks later our party stopped over night about twelve miles up from Tuxpam on the Tuxpam River opposite a large hacienda called San Miguel. We noticed when we arrived that there was a constant hammering just over the river in the settlement. It sounded as though a dozen carpenters were at work, and the pounding kept up all night. In the morning we inquired what was the occasion of this singular haste in building operations, and were told that the workmen were making boxes in which to bury the smallpox victims. It was reported that fifty-one had died the day before, and that the number of victims up to this time was upwards of three hundred, or nearly one-third of the population of the place. One of the natives told us that a very small percentage of the patients recover, which is easily understood when it is explained that the first form of treatment consists of a cold-water bath. This drives the fever in and usually kills the patient inside of forty-eight hours. There was no resident physician and the physicians in Tuxpam were too busy to leave town. They would not have come out anyway, as not one patient in fifty could afford to pay the price of a visit. A nearby settlement called Ojite, numbering sixty odd souls, was almost completely blotted out. There were not enough survivors to bury the dead. When we arrived at the boat we found our baggage stored away, with a variety of merchandise, including a hundred bags of flour, piled on top of it. There was not a foot of vacant space in the bottom of the boat, and we were expected to ride, eat and sleep for six days and nights on top of the cargo. The boatman had cunningly stored our effects underneath the merchandise hoping that we would not back out when we saw the cargo he was to take. However, we had become thoroughly disgusted with the place and conditions (the hotel man having arbitrarily charged us $25 for the hole we burned in his cheap pine floor), and were glad to get out of town by any route and at any cost. We all clambered aboard and were off at about three p.m. As we sat perched up on top of that load of luggage and merchandise when the boat pulled out of the harbor we must have looked more like pelicans sitting on a huge floating log than like "Americanos ricos" in search of rubber, vanilla and coffee lands. We didn't find as much rubber in the whole Republic of Mexico as there appeared to be in the necks of those idlers who had gathered on the shore to see us off.