This gloomy spot passed, the country opened far and wide before us; level and rather monotonous, but with nothing of the parched, sterile appearance that makes New Mexico so dreaded by most people. Trees were few and far between; but later, where the Mimbres river rolls its placid waters by, there are willows, and ash even, as I have heard people affirm. But I must not forget the hot spring we camped by for an hour or two, the _Aqua Caliente_ of the Mexicans. A square pond, to approach which you must clamber up a natural mud wall some two feet high, lay bubbling and steaming near the shade of some half dozen wide-spreading trees. That corner of the pond where the water boils out of the earth had once been tapped, apparently, and the water led to the primitive bath-tubs, made by digging down into the hard, clayey ground. A dismantled building showed that the place had at some time been permanently occupied, which was said to be the case by the Mexican family living under one of the trees, and who were sojourning here for the purpose of having life restored to the paralyzed limbs of one of the children. The people who had lived here were driven off by Indians, but I have heard since that the place had been rebuilt. The second day after leaving Fort Cummings we came in sight of a lovely valley, enclosed on all sides by low wooded hills, with bold, picturesque mountains rising to the sky beyond. A clear brook--so clear that it was rightly baptized Minne-ha-ha--gambolled and leaped and flashed among the green trees and the white tents they overhung; and in their midst a flag-staff, at whose head the stars and stripes were flying, told me that we had reached our journey's end. _TO TEXAS, AND BY THE WAY._ I had not seen New Orleans since I was eight years of age, and to Texas I had never been; so I was well pleased with the prospect of visiting the southern country. To one coming direct from California, overland by rail, it seems like entering a different world--a world that has been lying asleep for half a century--when the great "pan-handle" route is left to one side, and Louisville once passed. Though we know that the country was not asleep--only held in fetters by the hideous nightmare, Civil War--I doubt if the general condition of things would have been in a more advanced state of prosperity if the old order of affairs had remained unchanged, as the march of improvement seems naturally to lag in these languid, dreamy-looking southern lands.