After spending a long morning with the Indians and their cura, we took quite an affectionate leave of them.  Their last words were an apology for making us pay threepence apiece for the pineapples which we loaded our horses with.  In the season, they said, twelve for sixpence is the price, but the fruit was scarce and dear as yet.

Our companion, besides being engaged in the Orizaba cotton-mill, was one of the owners of the sugar-hacienda of the Potrero, below Cordova, and we all rode down there together from the Indian village, and spent the evening in walking about the plantation, and inspecting the new machinery and mills.  It was a pleasant sight to see the people coming to the well with their earthen jars, after their work was done, in an unceasing procession, laughing and chattering.  They were partly Indian, but with a considerable admixture of negro blood, for many black slaves were brought into the country in old times by the Spanish planters.  Now, of course, they and their descendants are free, and the hotter parts of Mexico are the paradise of runaway slaves from Louisiana and Texas; for, so far from their race being despised, the Indian women seek them as husbands, liking their liveliness and good humour better than the quieter ways of their own countrymen.  Even Europeans settled in Mexico sometimes take wives of negro blood.

I have never noticed in any country so large a number of mixed races, whose parentage is indicated by their features and complexion.  In Europe, the parent races are too nearly alike for the children of such mixed marriages to be strikingly different from either parent.  In America and the West Indies we are familiar with the various mixtures of white and negro, mulatto, quadroon, &c.; but in Mexico we have three races, Spanish, pure Mexican, and Negro, which, with their combinations, make a list of twenty-five varieties of the human race, distinguishable from one another, and with regular names, which Mayer gives in his work on Mexico, such as mulatto, mestizo, zambo, chino, and so forth.  Here all the brown Mexican Indians are taken as one race, and the Red Indians of the frontier-states are not included at all.  If we come to dividing out the various tribes which have been or still are existing in the country, we can count over a hundred and fifty, with from fifty to a hundred distinct languages among them.

Out of this immense variety of tribes, we can make one great classification.  The men of one race are brown in complexion, and have been for ages cultivators of the land.  It is among them only that the Mexican civilization sprang up, and they still remain in the country, having acquiesced in the authority of the Europeans, and to a great extent mingled with them by marriage.  This class includes the Aztecs, Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Zapotecs, &c., the old Toltecs, the present Indians of Central America, and, if we may consider them to be the same race, the nations