Page:Mexico in 1827 Vol 2.djvu/331

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MEXICO IN 1827.
315

of the very best kind, may be bought for fifty dollars, (10l.) and might have been purchased for half the money in 1823, before the influx of English raised the prices, as it always does. Many people prefer mules to horses for a long journey, and, in a very mountainous country, they certainly answer best: they are useful, too, for servants; but for my own riding I should never employ them, for it was my delight to stop, wherever there was game in the vicinity of the road, and, after shooting for half an hour, to rejoin my party at a canter, which would spoil a passo mule, although it does no sort of harm to a horse. When kept at their regular pace, however, mules are most extraordinary animals, and seem capable of continuing at the rate of thirty miles a day, from January to December, without fatigue or inconvenience. I had one little chesnut macho, that had been with Mr. Hervey to the Interior, and afterwards both with him and Mr. Morier to the coast. It was then transferred to Mr. Baring, with whom it went to Tĕpīc, from whence it returned just in time for me to repurchase it at the commencement of my own travels. In all these it carried my muleteer, a very heavy man; and when, in April 1837, I transferred the two together to Mr. Stokes, to go over no inconsiderable portion of the same ground again, there was as little in the mule, as in the rider, to indicate the fatigues which it had undergone. I may say the same of a little black terrier, one of the two only dogs that survived the