Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/462

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FACE TO FACE WITH THE MEXICANS.

Zacatlan, agricultural and industrial in the branch of liquors, and Tecamachalco, given to agriculture and milling. The garden spots of the north are: Zacatlan, with its natural beauty, its fair, lovely race, and distinguished families; Teziutlan, with the panoramas its territories offer; its people white and elegant, and the culture of its sons; Zacapoaxtla, with its florid vegetation, its agreeable, fine, mixed race, and the inclination of its sons toward literature, distinguished above all the people of the State; the inhabitants of Tetela de Ocanepo, whose people are clever and unpretentious—every one here can read and write, understands domestic history, general geography, geometry, numbers, the use of arms, and constitutional rights. In the towns forming the district of Tetela there is no Roman Catholic guild, nor is there need of a police judge, because here occur no robberies, no homicides, no quarrels, no impositions, no adulteries, nothing of crime or disorder. The Tetelanos are the Lacedemonians of the State of Puebla. The gardens of the south are: Picturesque Atlixco, watered by a hundred streams of crystal flood, with its orchards of varied fruits, its thickets of mixed flowers of loveliest hue, and withal a cultured society; Izricar of Matamoros, traversed by an overflowing stream like Atlixco, with its proud buildings, its lovely brown women, its ardent temperament, its fertile meadows, and its valuable sugar plantations, which bring enormous rental to their owners; Acatlan, land of fire, with its forward meadows, its fruitful ground-plots, its sugar-mills; its cane-fields, and its active commerce with the Pacific coast."

Tram-cars, built in New York, run in all directions from the city, some extending from ten to fifty miles, to villages, sugar haciendas, and factories. To Cholula it is but seven miles over the lovely green valley of Puebla, and in making the trip, we constantly enjoyed fresh and charming views. These included an ancient aqueduct and an old Spanish bridge across the river Atoyac, which affords water-power for factories and foundries.

We see the great pyramid of Cholula for miles before reaching it—a grand and imposing monument to the aboriginal builders! That these ready-handed Indian workers should have erected a mountain,