Many people have a fancy to climb the peak of Orizaba, which is 17,200 feet high. It requires but five hours of a good climb to reach the summit. The last eruptions it had were in 1545 and 1566. Several times it has been reported smoking, but the rumors were finally, on investigation, pronounced unfounded. The well-to-do people occupy one and two-story houses with overhanging and tile roofs, while the poor class construct their mansions out of old boards, sugar cane stalks, barrel staves, pieces of matting, sun-dried bricks, and thatch them with palm leaves and dried strips of maguey. Their floor is always the ground. The highest temperature in the shade at Orizaba is 30 deg., the lowest 12 deg., but the average is mostly 21 deg., with always an east wind prevailing. Orizaba is a delightful place for a stranger to stroll about in. We started out to see the town without guide or companion, and felt ourselves fully repaid by the many strange and delightful things we saw. We went to the market, which is situated on an open square, and examined all the curious things. The birds especially attracted our attention, the many varieties, colors and shapes, and the extremely low prices, some selling for a medio (6 1/4 cents), others for a real. Young parrots were fifty cents, mocking-birds $1, and buglers, a bird shaped like the mocking-bird, but lighter in color and far superior in song, $2.50 and $3. All that restrains one from making a large investment is the fact that many cannot live in cages, as none know on what food they subsist, consequently they have to die. Little snow-white dogs, with bright black eyes and hair fine as silk, about three to five inches in length, sell for $2, while the famous Chihuahua dog, which weighs about half a pound when full grown, commands from $75 to $100, since tourists have ruined the prices. Out by the unlucky Cathedral we saw the hearse of the town. It is the shape of a coffin, held aloft by springs above four wheels. It is draped with crape and plumes. Two black mules, stuck with plumes on every available spot, draw it, and the driver, dressed in black with high hat decorated with a plume, handles the reins, perched on a small seat about four feet above the rest of the hearse. The coffin is slid in at the back or end like the case in which coffins are often hermetically scaled.