supplied the place of the fastenings, with which no Mexican door is ever provided. We generally found, when Hilario had been successful in his catering, a large mess of meat stewing down upon our arrival. To this we added the game collected upon the road, which was usually sufficient to furnish not only ourselves, but the servants with an ample meal. At six or seven o'clock we sate down, where seats could be procured or manufactured, to our homely repast, and at eight we were glad to take refuge from the cold in bed.
After this general outline of our proceedings, I shall give an account of our route, with some of our little difficulties and distresses, the nature of which may be more clearly understood by a reference to the Map of Routes annexed to this volume, in which the whole journey is laid down in red, with the mountains and other obstacles by which our progress through some parts of the country was impeded. It contains, likewise, the States through which we passed; and although it does not include the towns in those States that we did not actually visit, still it conveys an idea of their relative position and extent, (the boundaries being correctly traced,) and will therefore form a necessary addition to any statistical information that it may be in my power to communicate.
On the 4th of November, we proceeded over ten leagues of desert and barren country to Tula, a small town, in the vicinity of which there is a bridge
