to have missed on account of the darkness having come on before we reached the town.  We were several times deceived that evening by the fireflies, which we took for lights moving about in some village just ahead of us; and we became so incredulous at last that we would not believe we had reached our journey’s end until we could made out the dim outlines of the houses.  At the inn at San Andres we found that we could have no rooms, as all the little windowless dens were occupied by people from the country who had come in for a fiesta.  There were indeed a good many men loafing about the courtyard, but scarcely any women, and we could hardly understand a fandango happening without them.  They thought otherwise, however; and presently, hearing the tinkling of a guitar, we went out and saw two great fellows in broad hats, jackets, and serapes, solemnly dancing opposite to one another; while more men looked on, smoking cigarettes, and an old fellow with a face like a baboon was squatting in one corner and producing the music we had heard.  To do them justice, I must say that we found, on further enquiry, they had not come from their respective ranchos merely to make fools of themselves in this way, but that there was to be some horsefair in the neighbourhood next day, and they were going there.

Our not being able to get any supper but eggs and bread, and having to sleep on the supper-table afterwards, confirmed us in the theory we were beginning to adopt, that nature and mankind vary in an inverse ratio; and we were off at daybreak, delighted to get into the forest again.  We rode over hill and dale for four or five hours, and then along the edge of a barranca for the rest of the day.  This was one of the grandest chasms we had ever seen, even in Mexico.  It was four or five miles wide, and two or three thousand feet deep, and its floor was a mass of tropical verdure, with here and there an Indian rancho and a patch of cultivated ground on the bank of the rapid river, whose sound we heard when we approached the edge of the barranca.  There were more orchids and epidendrites than ever in the forest.  In some places they had killed every third tree, by forming so and close a covering over its branches as to destroy its life; they were flourishing unimpaired on the rotting branches of trees which they had brought down to the ground years before.  The rainy season had not yet set in in this part of the country; and, though we could hear the rushing of the torrent below, we looked in vain for water in the forest, until our man Martin showed us the bromelias in the forks of the branches, in the inside of whose hollow leaves nature has laid up a supply of water for the thirsty traveller.