They also appeared to be able to do pretty well without much sleep, for Ned could not see that they showed any signs of fatigue. The camping-place was speedily left behind them, but it was no longer a night journey. Ned was almost astonished, now that the darkness was gone, to discover that this was by no means a wild, unsettled country. Not only were there many farms, with more or less well-built houses, but the cavalcade began to meet other wayfarers,--men and women,--on foot and on horseback, and hardly any of them were willing to be passed without obtaining the latest news from Vera Cruz and from the war. "I guess they need it," thought Ned. "The general says there are no newspapers taken down here, and that, if there were, not one person in five could read them. They seem a real good-natured lot, though." So they were, as much so as any other people in the world, and they were as capable of being developed and educated to better things. As to this being a new country, it came slowly back into Ned's mind that there had been a great and populous empire here at a time when the island upon which the city of New York was afterward built was a bushy wilderness, occupied by half-naked savages, who were ready to sell it for a few dollars' worth of kettles and beads. "I guess I'm beginning to wake up," thought Ned. "When the _Goshhawk_ was lying in the Bay of Vera Cruz, I was too busy to see anything. No, I wasn't. I did stare at the Orizaba mountain peak, and they told me it is over seventeen thousand feet high. First mountain I ever saw that could keep on snow and ice in such weather as this. I don't want to live up there in winter. Well! Now I've seen some of the biggest trees I ever did see. I wonder if any of them were here when the Spaniards came in. I guess they were, some of them." He was really beginning to see something of Mexico, and it almost made him forget the hardness of that unpleasant saddle. At the end of another mile, he was saying to himself: "That field yonder is tobacco, is it? The one we just passed was sugar-cane, and Pablo said the plantation across the road was almost all coffee. He says that further on he will show me orange groves, bananas, and that sort of thing. But what on earth are grenaditas and mangoes? They'll be something new to me, and I want to find out how they taste." Nothing at all of a military or otherwise of an apparently dangerous character had been encountered by the fugitive travellers when, at about the middle of the forenoon, they came to a parting of the ways. A seemingly well-travelled road went off to the left, or southward, while the one they were on turned more to the right and climbed a hill, as if it were making a further effort to get out of the _tierra caliente_. A great many things had been explained to Ned, as they rode along, and he was not surprised, therefore, when Senor Zuroaga said to him: