It was mid-day by this time; and, as we could not get to the Rio Grande without taking our chance for the night in some Indian rancho, we turned back. The heat had become so oppressive that we took off our coats; and Mr. Christy, riding in his shirt-sleeves and holding a white umbrella over his head, which he had further protected with a turban, declared that even in the East he had not had so fatiguing a ride. We passed through Soquital, and there the natives were idling and drinking spirits as before, and seemed hardly to have moved since we left. This plateau of Atotonilco el Grande, called for shortness Grande, is, like most of the high plains of Mexico, composed mostly of porphyry and obsidian, a valley filled up with débris from the surrounding mountains, which are all volcanic, embedded in reddish earth. The mountain-torrents—in which the water, so to speak, comes down all at once, not flowing in a steady stream all the year round as in England—have left evidences of their immense power in the ravines with which the sides of the hills, from their very tops downward, are fluted. These fluted mountain-ridges resemble the “Kamms” (combs) of the Swiss Alps, called so from their toothed appearance. We had met numbers of Indians, bringing their wares to the Sunday market in the great square of Atotonilco el Grande; and when we reached the town on our way home, business was still going on briskly; so we put up our horses, and spent an hour or two in studying the people and the commodities they dealt in. It was a real old-fashioned Indian market, very much such as the Spaniards found when they first penetrated into the country. A large proportion of the people could speak no Spanish, or only a few words. The unglazed pottery, palm-leaf mats, ropes and bags of aloe-fibre, dressed skins, &c., were just the same wares that were made three centuries ago; and there is no improvement in their manufacture. This people, who rose in three centuries from the condition of wandering savages to a height of civilization that has no equal in history—considering the shortness of the time in which it grew up—have remained, since the Conquest, without making one step in advance. They hardly understand any reason for what they do, except that their ancestors did things so—they therefore must be right. They make their unglazed pottery, and carry it five and twenty miles to market on their heads, just as they used to do when there were no beasts of burden in the country. The same with their fruits and vegetables, which they have brought great distances, up the most difficult mountain-paths, at a ruinous sacrifice of time and trouble, considering what a miserable sum they will get for them after all, and how much even of this will be spent in brandy. By working on a hacienda they would get double what their labour produces in this way, but they do not understand this kind of reasoning. They cultivate their