The Mexican native miner is, in his way, expert and active, and with rude appliances performs marvels in the work of ore extraction. Halt a moment by yonder pit in the rocky slope. Look down: a notched pole descends, upon which you would hesitate to venture, giving access to the workings beneath. Yet, in a moment, perhaps, a peon, bearing on his back an enormous load of rock in a hide or sack, will ascend from the bowels of the earth, panting and groaning--we shall hear the noise of his breathing before we see him. He will cast his load at our feet, and from it will roll the gleaming quartz and pyrites, with perhaps the red of the _rosicler_, or rich oxide ore of silver, or the yellow ochres of the decomposed gold-bearing sulphides, more readily prepared by Nature for treatment and winning of the yellow metal. Or he may bear it to the stream-bed, there to treat it in some primitive stone mill. Otherwise we may visit huge modern mills where hundreds of stamps are clanging and engines are winding and furnaces are burning, for a host of these exist throughout the land, though disorder and revolution may have suspended their operations. Many curious products of the vegetable world attract our eyes. Behold yonder stupendous cactus-trees--the organo cactus, whose symmetrical spiny branches like a giant candelabrum, weighing perhaps tons, with their mass of sappy foliage, arise from a single stem, which could be brought down by a stroke of a _machete_, or wood-knife--that formidable implement or weapon (made perhaps in Birmingham) which the Mexican peon loves to wield or use. Look at the marvellous giant leaves of the juicy _maguey_, or agave, as long as a man, and see the peon insert his siphon to the heart of the plant to draw forth its sap, which he blows into the goatskin on his back, and from which he will presently make his _pulque_. This plant, the great American aloe, comes into flower and dies in a few years. It exhausts itself in flowering. In England we call it the century plant, for the exotic lingers long in the unfavourable climate, and with difficulty puts forth its blossoms at all. There, too, are hedges and _circas_ of prickly-pear, or nopal, which yield the delicious wild fig--the cactus familiar to the traveller in the Holy Land and Syria, whence it was taken from Mexico.