The country along the southern portion of the Sonora railway would be interesting in the extreme to one unfamiliar with tropical or sub-tropical countries. Its vegetation was most curious, and the surrounding country picturesque. Fine scenery can, indeed, be viewed in a thousand places in our own country, but it is not characterized with such a wonderful plant growth as we saw that morning on our way to the slaughter grounds of the peccaries. Here was the universal mesquite, looking like a dwarfed apple tree, and that affords the brightest fire of any wood ever burned. The tender of our engine was filled with it, and, as far as fuel was concerned, we could have made sixty miles an hour, had we wished to do so. The wood of the mesquite is of a beautiful bright cherry red; many a time I have wondered if this plentiful, tough, and twisted timber of the far Southwest could not be utilized in some way as a fancy wood; certainly a more beautiful color was never seen. Occasionally I thought I saw my old friend the sagebrush; then there was the ironwood (_palo de hierro_), that looks like a very fine variety of the mesquite. Its name is derived from its hardness, and is well deserved. It requires an ax to fell each tree, and as the quality of different trees is always the same, and that of different axes is not, even this ratio of one ax to one tree has to be changed occasionally, and always in favor of the tree. There was a story going the rounds that a tramp, who had wandered into that country (tramps sometimes get lost and find themselves in Sonora just once), with the usual appetite of his class applied for something to eat. In reply he was told, if he would get out a certain number of rails for a fence, the proprietor would give him a week's board. It was, as he thought, about a day's work that had been assigned him, and bright and early next morning he sallied out with his ax on his shoulder. Unfortunately the most tempting tree he met was an ironwood. Very late in the evening he returned with the ax helve on his arm. "How many rails did you split to-day?" was asked. "I did not split any, but I hewed out one," was the reply; and then he resigned his position.