102 A Buffalo Hunt in Northern Mexico. 



under some great rock, and I am not certain but the plain or the 

 rock would furnish preferable lodging. The peon, however, to whom 

 the sunburnt and perishing habitations have fallen, is of simple soul, 

 full of easy content. He and Nature live close neighbors, and what 

 with much borrowing from her, he has few needs ungratified, and no 

 experience of better things to dog him with vain wishes. Of these 

 places of torment — I speak as somewhat used to civilized ways — 

 there rise vividly to mind Seguein, Bocarilla, Tierra Leon, and Salitre. 

 Should my reader be of the class sometimes smitten with a longing 

 for a home in a desert, let me recommend to him a day and night in 

 Salitre. Besides the solitude of the waste place it is squatted in, the 

 flavor of muscat, in constant distillation, hangs round it all the year. 

 Superb specimen of a low-down rancho, nothing need be said of it as 

 a hotel. 



But these midway stops are not all Bocarillas and Salitres. The 

 hacienda of Patos was the residence of the administrator of the great 

 Carlos Sanchez, who, in Maximilian's day, was monarch of over seven 

 thousand peons, settled on his estate of 8,131,242 acres. With such 

 possessions it is not wonderful that Carlos was overcharmed by the 

 prospect of an empire ; and when he accepted the office of Grand 

 Chamberlain to the short-lived emperor, it is not more strange that 

 Juarez, the Lincoln of his country, followed him with a decree by 

 which Patos became the property of the nation, subject to purchase. 

 A more beautiful place will scarcely be found in Mexico. He who 

 has seen the patio of the Casa Grande, and rested in the coolness of 

 its broad colonnade, may not soon forget Patos, which he comes upon 

 from the hill-country between Saltillo and Parras, an unexpected 

 Paradise on a grim, purgatorial road. 



Then Hornos will not out of mind. First heard of at Alamos, it 

 is finally overtaken at the end of a long day's journey. Its externals 

 are nothing, — four dead faces of cream-white stone, originally softer 

 than the coquina of Florida, — no windows, one door with two mighty 

 valves which look as if they might have once hung in the Joppa gates 

 of Jerusalem. 



A hospitable Spaniard told me the story of the house. Senor 

 Don Leonardo Zuloaga was a European by birth and education. He 

 owned a great estate on the edge of the unexplored Bolson, extend- 

 ing quite to Alamos on the south. The fortune was ducal. There 



