URIQUE AND ITS MINES. 291 
treme. This rainy season in Northern 
Mexico lasts from about the first or mid¬ 
dle of June until the middle of Septem¬ 
ber. It is against such enormous odds 
that man has to battle with Nature in 
this secluded part of the earth in order 
to get at her wealth that is otherwise so 
lavishly strewn around. After one has 
passed ten or twelve days on the roughest 
of mountain trails in order to reach this 
point, and reflects that the discoverers 
must have been without even this poor 
aid to progress, one’s respect for the old 
Spanish explorers of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury is sure to be heartily accorded. They 
were undoubtedly a much hardier, more 
daring, persistent, and intrepid class of 
people than those who struck the Atlantic 
shores of our own country. But, great 
ghost of Cortes, how things have changed ! 
