We swung our hammocks on the sixth night out in the municipal building of Tabla Ve; but there was little sleep. Towards morning the night turned bitterly cold, and the dampness rose from the earthen floor of the hut like a breath from the open door of a refrigerator, and kept us shivering in spite of sweaters and rubber blankets. Above, the moon and stars shone brilliantly in a clear sky, but down in the valley in which the village lay, a mist as thick as the white smoke of a locomotive rose out of the ground to the level of the house-tops, and hid Tabla Ve as completely as though it were at the bottom of a lake. The dogs of the village moved through the mist, howling dismally, and meeting to fight with a sudden sharp tumult of yells that made us start up in our hammocks and stare at each other sleepily, while Jeffs rambled on, muttering and moaning in his fever. It was not a pleasant night, and we rode up the mountain-side out of the mist the next morning unrefreshed, but satisfied to be once more in the sunlight. They had told us at Tabla Ve that there was to be a bull-baiting that same afternoon at the village of Seguatepec, fifteen miles over the mountain, where a priest was holding a church festival. So we left Jeffs to push along with the mozos, and by riding as fast as the mules could go, we reached Seguatepec by four in the afternoon. [Illustration: A VILLAGE IN THE INTERIOR] It was a bright, clean town, sitting pertly on the flat top of a hill that fell away from it evenly on every side. It had a little church and a little plaza, and the church was so vastly superior to every other house in the place--as was the case in every village through which we passed--as to make one suppose that it had been built by one race of people and the houses by another. The plaza was shut in on two of its sides by a barrier seven rails high, held together by ox-hide ropes. This barrier, with the houses fronting the plaza on its two other sides, formed the arena in which the bull was to be set at liberty. All of the windows and a few of the doors of the houses were barred, and the open places between were filled up by ramparts of logs. There was no grand-stand, but every one contributed a bench or a table from his own house, and the women seated themselves on these, while the men and boys perched on the upper rail of the barricade. The occasion was a memorable one, and all the houses were hung with strips of colored linen, and the women wore their brilliant silk shawls, and a band of fifteen boys, none of whom could have been over sixteen years of age, played a weird overture to the desperate business of the afternoon.