interest in these Indian districts, and so trifling a matter as a revolution and a change of people in power does not affect them perceptibly.  The Indians are absolutely free, and have their votes and their civil privileges like any other citizens.  All that the owners of the plantations ask of them is to work for high wages, and hitherto they have done this, but for years it has been becoming more and more difficult to get them to work.  All they do with the money when they get it, is to spend it in drinking and gambling, if they are of an extravagant turn of mind; or to bury it in some out-of-the-way place, if they are given to saving.  If they were whites or half-caste Mexicans they would spend their money upon fine clothes and horses, but the Indian keeps to the white cotton dress of his fathers, and is never seen on horseback.  Now this being the case, it does not seem unreasonable that they should not much care about working hard for money that is of so little use to them when they have got it, and that they should prefer living in their little huts walled with canes and thatched with palm-leaves, and cultivating the little patch of garden-ground that lies round it—­which will produce enough fruit and vegetables for their own subsistence, and more besides, which they can sell for clothes and tobacco.  A day or two of this pleasant easy work at their own ground will provide this, and they do not see why they should labour as hired servants to get more.  This is bad enough, think the hacendados, but there is worse behind.  The Indians have been of late years becoming gradually aware that the government of the country is quite rotten and powerless, and that in their own districts at least, the power is very much in their own hands, for the few scattered whites could offer but slight resistance.  The doctrine of “America for the Americans” is rapidly spreading among them, and active emissaries are going about reminding them that the Spaniards only got their lands by the right of the strongest, and that now is the time for them to reassert their rights.

The name of Alvarez is circulated among them, as the man who is to lead them in the coming struggle—­Alvarez the mulatto general, whose hideous portrait is in every print-shop in Mexico.  He was President before Comonfort, and is now established with his Indian regiments in the hot pestilential regions of the Pacific coast.

The undisguised contempt with which the Indians have been treated for ages by the whites and the mestizos has not been without its effect.  The revolution, and the abolition of all legal distinctions of caste still left the Indians mere senseless unreasoning creatures in the eyes of the whiter races; and, if the original race once get the upper hand, it will go hard with the whites and their estates in these parts.  Only a day or two before we came down from Mexico, the government had endeavoured to quarter some troops in one of the little Indian towns which we passed through on our way from Temisco.  But the inhabitants saluted them with volleys of stones from the church-steeple and the house-tops, and they had to retreat most ignominiously into their old quarters among “reasonable people.”