"Let us turn from great to smaller things--to witness the labors of the men who work, and eat, and often sleep in the volcano. Some are digging sulphur and placing it in baskets, while others are waiting to carry it upon their heads up the side of the crater. Others, again, out of our sight far up the mountain, are working at the oven, when the weather is clear, and there is no cloud between them and the sun, as it is only in the finest weather that men can work upon the top, or carry burdens to the hacienda. When the weather is fine, all the works are in full operation, and good profits are realized by furnishing brimstone for the manufacture of sulphuric acid. "We are at the top once more; and now that our eyesight, which we lost in climbing the mountain, is restored to us, we will take a view of the lower world. Looking toward the west, every object glows in the brightness of the rising sun, except where the mountain casts its vast shadow even across the valley of Toluca. How strangely diminished now are all familiar objects that are visible! The pureness of the medium through which things are seen presents distant objects with great distinctness, but it will not present them in their natural size, for it can not change the angle of vision. The villages upon the table-land were apparently pigmy villages, inhabited by pigmy men and pigmy women, surrounded with pigmy cattle, and garrisoned by pigmy soldiery. It is, by an optical illusion, Liliput in real life. Had the English satirist placed himself where we now stood, he would have more than realized the picture which his fancy painted. He might have seen the marshaled hosts of Liliput marching to the beat of drum, in the proud array of war. "If you wish to see all the sights, you must walk around the mountain, and look down its steepest side, where there is no table-land, into the 'hot country.' The distance is so vast, the descent so steep, that an inexperienced climber suffers from dizziness. If you climb to the very summit, 250 feet above the mouth of the crater, you will find more surface about you. But it is a point where few can desire to remain long, or to visit it a second time." THE SULPHUR MINE.