The children were bright, dirty, and pretty; the women so closely enveloped in their _rebozos_ that only one eye could be seen. They greeted our people with warmth, and offered to go with us to the mountains. With the volubility of parrots they began to describe a most blood-thirsty fight recently had with the Chiricahuas, in which, of course, the Apaches had been completely and ignominiously routed, each Mexican having performed prodigies of valor on a par with those of Ajax. But at the same time they wouldn’t go alone into their fields,--only a quarter of a mile off,--which were constantly patrolled by a detachment of twenty-five or thirty men of what was grandiloquently styled the National Guard. “Peaches,” the guide, smiled quietly, but said nothing, when told of this latest annihilation of the Chiricahuas. General Crook, without a moment’s hesitancy, determined to keep on the trail farther into the Sierra Madre. The food of these wretched Mexicans was mainly _atole_,--a weak flour-gruel resembling the paste used by our paper-hangers. Books they had none, and newspapers had not yet been heard of. Their only recreation was in religious festivals, occurring with commendable frequency. The churches themselves were in the last stages of dilapidation; the adobe exteriors showed dangerous indications of approaching dissolution, while the tawdry ornaments of the inside were foul and black with age, smoke, dust, and rain. I asked a small, open-mouthed boy to hold my horse for a moment until I had examined one of these edifices, which bore the elaborate title of the Temple of the Holy Sepulchre and our Lady of the Trance. This action evoked a eulogy from one of the bystanders: “This man can’t be an American, he must be a Christian,” he sagely remarked; “he speaks Castilian, and goes to church the first thing.” It goes without saying that they have no mails in that country. What they call the post-office of Basaraca is in the store of the town. The store had no goods for sale, and the post-office had no stamps. The postmaster didn’t know when the mail would go; it used to go every eight days, but now--_quien sabe?_ Yes, he would send our letters the first opportunity. The price? Oh! the price?--did the _caballeros_ want to know how much? Well, for Mexican people, he charged five cents, but the Americans would have to pay _dos reales_ (twenty-five cents) for each letter.