so many hundred bales of cotton, free of duty.  When the ship arrived at port, however, the Yankee captain brought in his manifest with a broad grin upon his face.  The inspectors went down to the ship, and stood aghast.  There were the bales of cotton, but such bales!  They had to be shoved and coaxed to get them up through the hatchways at all.  The Customhouse officials protested in vain.  The order was for so many bales of cotton, and these overgrown monsters were bales of cotton, and the merchants sent them up to Mexico in triumph.

To us, Puebla was not an interesting city.  It was built by the Spaniards, and called Puebla de los Angeles, because angels assisted in building the cathedral, which does no great credit to their good taste.  Its costly ornaments of gold, silver, jewels, and variegated marbles, are most extraordinary.  One does not know which to wonder at most, the value and beauty of the materials, or the unmitigated ugliness of the designs.

We saw the festival of Corpus Christi while we were in Puebla; but were to a certain extent disappointed in the display of plate and jewelled vestments for the clergy, whose attempt to overthrow Comonfort’s government had only resulted in themselves being heavily fined, and who were in consequence keeping their wealth in the background, and making as little display as possible.  The most interesting part of the ceremonial to us was to see the processions of Indians from the surrounding villages, walking crowned with flowers, and carrying Madonnas in bowers of green branches and blossoms.

At the head of each procession walked an Indian beating a drum, tap, tap, tap, without a vestige of time.  The other processions with stoles and canopies, and the officials of the city in dress-coats and yellow kid gloves, were paltry affairs enough.

Neither during this ceremonial, nor at Easter in the Capital were any miracles exhibited, like the performances of the Madonna at Palermo, which the coachmen of the city carry about at Easter, weeping real tears into a cambric pocket-handkerchief; nor is anything done in the country like the lighting of the Greek fire, or the melting of the blood of St. Januarius.

Puebla pretty much belongs to the clergy, who are paramount there.  A population of some sixty thousand has seventy-two churches, some of them very large.  It is the focus of the church-party, whose steady powerful resistance to reform is one of the causes of the unhappy political state of the country.  As is usual in cathedral-towns, the morality of the people is rather lower than elsewhere.  I have said already that the revenues of the Mexican Church are very large.  Tejada estimates the income at twenty millions of dollars yearly, more than the whole revenue of the State; but this calculation far exceeds that given by any other authority.  He remarks that the Church has always tried as much as possible to conceal its riches, and probably he makes a very large allowance for this.  At any rate, I think we may reasonably estimate the annual income of the Church at $10,000,000, or L2,000,000, two-thirds of the income of the State.