who huilt the now ruined cities of Palenque, Copan, Uxmal, and so forth.  The other race is that of the Red Indians who inhabit the prairie-states of North Mexico, such as the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos.  They are hunters, as they always were, and they will never preserve their existence by adopting agriculture as their regular means of subsistence, and settling in peace among the white men.  As it has been with their countrymen further north, so it will be with them; a few years more, and the Americans will settle Chihuahua and Sonora, and we shall only know these tribes by specimens of their flint arrow-heads and their pipes in collections of curiosities, and their skulls in ethnological cabinets.

One of the strangest races (or varieties, I cannot say which) are the Pintos of the low lands towards the Pacific coast.  A short time before we were in the country General Alvarez had quartered a whole regiment of them in the capital; but when we were there they had returned with their commander into the tierra caliente towards Acapulco.  They are called "Pintos" or painted men, from their faces and bodies being marked with great daubs of deep blue, like our British ancestors; but here the decoration is natural and cannot be effaced.

They have the reputation of being a set of most ferocious savages; and, badly armed as they are with ricketty flint- or match-locks, and sabres of hoop-iron, they are the terror of the other Mexican soldiery, especially when the war has to be carried on in the hot pestilential coast-region, their native country.

CHAR XII.

CHALCHICOMULA.  JALAPA.  VERA CRUZ.  CONCLUSION.

[Illustration:  INDIANS OF THE PLATEAU. (After Nebel.)]

The mountain-slopes which descend from the Sierra Madre eastward toward the sea are furrowed by barrancas—­deep ravines with perpendicular sides, and with streams flowing at the bottom.  But here all these barrancas run almost due east and west, so that our journey from Vera Cruz to Mexico was made, as far as I can recollect, without crossing one.  Now, the case was quite different.  We had to go from the Potrero to the city of Jalapa, about fifty miles on the map, nearly northward, and to get over these fifty miles cost us two days and a half of hard riding.

By the road it cannot be much less than eighty miles; but people used to tell us that, during the American war, an Indian went from Orizaba to Jalapa with despatches within the twenty-four hours, probably by mountain-paths which made it a little shorter.  He came quite easily into Jalapa at the same shuffling trot which he had kept up almost without intermission for the whole distance.  This is the Indian’s regular pace when he is on a journey, and I believe that the Red Indians of the north have a similar gait.