1 1 6 A Buffalo Hunt in Northern Mexico. 



We moved rapidly along a plain road ; after a league or more, 

 the road faded into a dim path ; another league, and we were in the 

 mid-desert. Moved by the novelty of the situation, I let the party 

 pass me, that I might be alone. 



Mira ! A world of grass, each blade brown or yellowing on the 

 stalk, not dying so much as curing itself, — just far enough gone to 

 rustle at the touches of the winnowing winds ; a world of grass with- 

 out a flower, nor even a wee anemone. The trees are few in number 

 and variety. Off yonder is a solitary cabbage-palm, tall, shaggy, 

 crowned with a shock of green bayonets ; it stands motionless, the 

 image of a listening watchman. Here and there groves thinly fleck 

 the broad brown face on which they endure, in the distance wear- 

 ing the air of neglected apple-orchards. They are mesquite trees, 

 for which I confess partiality, not for their beauty, but for their 

 courage. The idea and the word, as applied, may startle the reader ; 

 yet I sometimes please myself thinking that in the kingdom of plants 

 there is a degree of the royal quality. The lichen, up in the realm 

 of the reindeer, and the willow, which survives long burial by the 

 snows everlastingly whitening the echoless shores of Lincoln Sea, 

 must be braver than the palm on the Nile or the redwood on the 

 Amazon. So with the mesquite of the desert. Ah, here is one of 

 them close by, — knotted, gnarled, dwarfed, brittle, black of bark, 

 vaster of root than top, yet with a certain grace derived from its 

 small, emerald green leaves, so delicately set on trembling fronds. 

 I have only to look at it once to recognize a hero, not of many 

 tilts with storms, but of an endless battle with drought and burning 

 sun, living sometimes years on nothing but faintest dews. Is it 

 wonderful that it grew branching from the ground so low as to be 

 trunkless ? Or that its limbs separated in the beginning, and did 

 their feeble climbing wider and wider apart each day of life, as hate- 

 ful of each other and the humble stem which generated them ? Or 

 that at last, when full grown, yet comparatively a shrub of low 

 degree, thin and wan of foliage, its shade ill suffices to cool the 

 gophers nestling down deep amongst its sprawling roots, or the 

 crickets, panting as they sing in the gray mosses of uncertain life, 

 stitched like prickly patches on its weather side ? 



Nevertheless, the tree was disposed to serve me. As I looked at 

 it, thinking of its struggle for life, I was conscious of a warning, — 

 what if I should get lost ? 



