Leaving Chihuahua and bearing west toward the Sierra Madres, one finds the road even crowded with Mexican transportation, all from the rich silver belt now being rapidly developed, chiefly by American wealth. There are great carts with solid wooden wheels of the Nazarene style, the patient donkey of the same period, and all so numerous that one would think there was an exodus from a city soon to be put under siege. Almost anything that grows about the home of a Mexican of the lower order furnishes an excuse for him to take it into town with a hope of selling it. Until we were fairly out of the suburbs our party were the only occupants of the coach, but there we were joined by a Mexican gentleman, the son of a wealthy mine owner, who lived back in the mountains. He was on his way to his fathers mining district, and, as I had met him and talked with him before leaving, I had so timed my departure as to be with him for at least a part of the journey. The country directly back of Chihuahua reminded me greatly of our own plains by the imperceptible manner in which it rises toward the foothills of the mountains, although it was far more fertile and well watered, as the numbers of rich ranches along the way testified. At nine o'clock we stopped to eat breakfast and change mules. Our morning meal consisted of a concoction dignified by the name of coffee, with tortillas (the people's bread--pancakes of coarsely ground corn and water) and some stale eggs served in battered tin dishes upon a rough wooden box. The stage station being the only house in that part of the country, we could not be choosers. I noticed, however, that the soil was of the richest kind and well watered, so that anything could have been raised. What a paradise could be made by energy and industry where nature has already done so much. At noon we stopped at one of the numerous simple and dreary little villages with which the country is studded. They appear far more desolate than the open, bare _mesa_ lands. All are much alike, each having one or two streets of adobe houses, and a church of forbidding aspect, which fronts on a still more uninviting looking plaza, about fifty or seventy-five feet square, and set with whitewashed adobe benches, a stripe of green about the latter being almost the only thing to remind one of the color of verdure. The plaza is the pleasure ground of the people, and a more cheerless-looking place one could not imagine.