54 Audubon's Western Journal 



left full of mud, and the deepest water for a week 

 or so outside the regular channel. 



I do not believe any part of this country can be 

 good for a thing, as the rain is so uncertain in its 

 favors. The miserable Mexicans, who live far 

 apart, at distances of ten or even twenty miles 

 from each other, do not plant their patches of corn 

 with any certainty that it will mature, the rain fail- 

 ing to come to fill the ears more frequently than it 

 comes. 



The ranches are forlorn "Jacals" (a sort of open- 

 work shed covered with skins and rushes and 

 plastered with mud, here so full of lime and marl 

 that it makes a hard and lasting mortar) , precisely 

 alike, varying only in picturesqueness of tree or 

 shrub, or rather shrub alone, for there are no fine 

 trees here, though the musquit^ and willow some- 

 times arrive at the height of twenty or twenty-five 

 feet, and back from the river the hackberry attains 

 a tolerable size. 



A tall reed of rank growth in thickets, and in 

 other places a dwarf willow in patches like the 

 young cottonwoods along the banks of the Missis- 

 sippi, are the chief growth. 



The water is warm, and so full of lime as to 

 create, rather than allay thirst; what but necessity 



^ The mesquit or mesquite is a tree, resembling the locust,. 

 of which there are several species in Mexico and the south- 

 western part of the United States. 



