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o'clock, moving in a north-northwest direction, we entered the village of Huacachahoul, standing in an open situation, surrounded by mountains, and peopled entirely by Indians, wilder and niore savage than any we had yet seen. The men were without hats, but wore their long black hair reaching to their shoulders; and the old men and women, with harsh and haggard features and dark rolling eyes, had a most unbaptized appearance. They gave us no greetings, and their wild but steady glare made us feel a little nervous. A collection of naked boys and girls called Mr. Catherwood "Tata," mistaking him for a padre. We had some misgivings when we put the village behind us, and felt ourselves enclosed in the country of wild Indians. We stopped an hour near a stream, and at half past six arrived at Chillon, where, to our surprise and pleasure, we found a sub-prefect, a white man, and intelligent, who had travelled to San Salvador, and knew General Morazan. He was very anxious to know whether there was any revolution in Ciudad Real, as, with a pliancy becoming an office-holder, he wished to give in his adhesion to the new government.

The next morning, at a quarter before seven, we started with a new set of Indians. The road was good to Yahalon, which we reached at ten o'clock. Before entering it we met a young Indian girl with her father, of extraordinary beauty of face, in the costume of the country, but with a modest expression of countenance, which we all particularly remarked as evidence of her innocence and unconsciousness of anything wrong in her appearance. Every village we passed was most picturesque in position, and here the church was very effective; as in the preceding villages, it was undergoing repairs.

Here we were obliged to take another set of Indians, and perhaps we should have lost the day but for the padre, who called off some men working at the church. At a quarter past eleven we set off again; at a quarter before one we stopped at the side of a stream to lunch. At this place a young Indian overtook us, with a very intelligent face, who seated himself beside me, and said, in remarkably good Spanish, that we must beware of the Indians. I gave him some tortillas. He broke off a small piece, and holding it in his fingers, looked at me, and with great emphasis said he had eaten enough; it was of no use to eat; he ate all he could get, and did not grow fat; and, thrusting his livid face into mine, told me to see how thin he was. His face was calm, but one accidental expression betrayed him as a maniac; and I now noticed in his face, and all over his body, white spots of leprosy, and started away from him. I endeavoured to persuade him to go back to the village, but he said it made no difference whether he went to the village or not; he wanted a remedio for his thinness.

Soon after we came upon the banks of the River of Yahalon. It was excessively hot, the river as pure as water could be, and we stopped and had a delightful bath. After this we commenced ascending a steep mountain, and when high up saw the poor crazed young Indian standing in the same place on the bank of the river. At half past five, after a toilsome ascent, we reached the top of the mountain, and rode along the borders of a table of land several thousand feet high, looking down into an immense valley, and turning to the left, around the corner of the forest, entered the outskirts of Tumbala. The huts were distributed among high, rugged, and picturesque rocks, which had the appearance of having once formed the crater of a volcano. Drunken Indians were

lying in the path, so that we had to turn out to avoid treading on them. Riding through a narrow passage between these high rocks, we came out upon a corner of the lofty perpendicular table several thousand feet high, on which stood the village of Tumbala. In front were the church and convent; the square was filled with wild-looking Indians preparing for a fiesta, and on the very corner of the immense table was a high conical peak, crowned with the ruins of a church. Altogether it was the wildest and most extraordinary place we had yet seen, and though not consecrated by associations, for unknown ages it had been the site of an Indian village.

It was one of the circumstances of our journey in this country that every hour and day produced something new. We never had any idea of the character of the place we were approaching until we entered it, and one surprise followed close upon another. On one corner of the table of land stood the cabildo. The jus titia was the brother of our silver-dish friend Padre Solis, as poor and energetic as the padre was rich and inert. At the last village we had been told that it would be impossible to procure Indians for the next day on account of the fiesta, and had made up our minds to remain; but my letters from the Mexican authorities were so effective, that immediately the justitia held a parley with forty or fifty Indians, and, breaking off occasionally to cuff one of them, our journey was arranged through to Palenque in three days, and the money paid and distributed. Although the wildness of the Indians made us feel a little uncomfortable, we almost regretted this unexpected promptness; but the justitia told us we had come at a fortunate moment, for many of the Indians of San Pedro, who were notori

ously a bad set, were then in the village, but he could select those he knew, and would send an alguazil of his own with us all the way. As he did not give us any encouragement to remain, and seemed anxious to hurry us on, we made no objections, and in our anxiety to reach the end of our journey, had a superstitious apprehension of the effect of any voluntary delay.

With the little of daylight that remained, he conducted us along the same path trodden by the Indians centuries before, to the top of the cone rising at the corner of the table of land, from which we looked down on one side into an immense ravine several thousand feet in depth, and on the other, over the top of a great mountain range, we saw the village of San Pedro, the end of our next day's journey, and beyond, over the range of the mountains of Palenque, the Lake of Terminos and the Gulf of Mexico. It was one of the grandest, wildest, and most sublime scenes I ever beheld. On the top were ruins of a church and tower, probably once used as a lookout, and near it were thirteen crosses erected over the bodies of Indians, who, a century before, tied the hands and feet of the curate, and threw him down the precipice, and were killed and buried on the spot. Every year new crosses are set up over their bodies, to keep alive in the minds of the Indians the fate of murderers. All around, on almost inaccessible mountain heights, and in the deepest ravines, the Indians have their milpas or corn-patches, living almost as when the Spaniards broke in upon them, and the justitia pointed with his finger to a region still occupied by the "unbaptized :" the same strange people whose mysterious origin no man knows, and whose destiny no man can foretell. Among all the wild scenes of our hurried tour, none is more strongly impressed

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upon my mind than this; but with the untamed Indians around, Mr. Catherwood was too much excited and too nervous to attempt to make a sketch of it.

At dark we returned to the cabildo, which was decorated with evergreens for the fiesta, and at one end was a table, with a figure of the Virgin fantastically dressed, sitting under an arbour of pine-leaves.

In the evening we visited the padre, the delegate of Padre Solis, a gentlemanly young man from Ciudad Real, who was growing as round, and bade fair to grow as rich out of this village as Padre Solis himself. He and the justitia were the only white men in the place. We returned to the cabildo; the Indians came in to bid the justitia buenos noces, kissed the back of his hand, and we were left to ourselves.

Before daylight we were roused by an irruption of Indian carriers with lighted torches, who, while we were still in bed, began tying on the covers of our trunks to carry them off. At this place the mechanic arts were lower than in any other we had visited. There was not a rope of any kind in the village; the fastenings of the trunks and the straps to go around the forehead were all of bark strings; and here it was customary for those who intended to cross the mountains to take hammacas or sillas; the former being a cushioned chair, with a long pole at each end, to be borne by four Indians before and behind, the traveller sitting with his face to the side, and, as the justitia told us, only used by very heavy men and padres; and the latter an armchair, to be carried on the back of an Indian. We had a repugnance to this mode of conveyance, considering, though unwilling to run any risk, that where an Indian could climb with one of us on his back we could climb alone, and set out without either silla or hammaca.