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VAGABOND LIFE

IN

MEXICO.

BY

GABRIEL FERRY,

FOR SEVEN YEARS RESIDENT IN THAT COUNTRY.


NEW YORK.

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1856.




CONTENTS.

                                                    PAGE
PERICO, THE MEXICAN VAGABOND                           5

FRAY SERAPIO, THE FRANCISCAN MONK                     47

DON TADEO CRISTOBAL, THE THIEVES' LAWYER OF MEXICO    90

REMIGIO VASQUEZ                                      128

THE MINERS OF RAYAS                                  177

CAPTAIN DON BLAS AND THE SILVER CONVOY               217

THE JAROCHOS                                         277

THE PILOT VENTURA                                    314




VAGABOND LIFE IN MEXICO.




Perico, the Mexican Vagabond.




CHAPTER I.

The Jamaïca and Mount Parnassus.


Mexico is the most beautiful city ever built by the Spaniards in the New
World; and even in Europe it would take a high place for splendor and
magnificence. If you wish to behold the magnificent and varied panorama
which Mexico presents, you have only to mount at sunset one of the
towers of the Cathedral. On whatever side you turn your eye, you see
before you the serrated peaks of the Cordilleras, forming a gigantic
azure belt of about sixty leagues in circumference. To the south, the
two volcanoes which overtop the other peaks of the sierra raise their
majestic summits, covered with eternal snow, which, in the evening sun,
put on a pale purple hue flecked with delicate ruby. The one,
Popocatapetl (smoking mountain), is a perfect cone, dazzling in the blue
vault of heaven; the other, Iztaczihuatl (the white woman), has the
appearance of a nymph reclining, who lifts her icy shoulders to receive
the last beams of the dying sun. At the foot of the two volcanoes gleam
two lakes, like mirrors, which reflect the clouds in their waters, and
where the wild swan plays its merry gambols. To the west rises an
immense pile of building, the palace of Chapultepec, once the abode of
the old viceroys of New Spain. Round the mountain on which it is built
stretches, in a long, waving belt of verdure, a forest of cedars more
than a thousand years old. A fountain bubbles forth at the top of the
mountain; its brawling waters leap down into the valley, where they are
received into an aqueduct, and thus conducted into a large and populous
city, to supply the wants of its inhabitants. Villages, steeples, and
cupolas rise on all sides from the bottom of the valley. Dusty roads
cross and recross one another like gold stripes on a green ground, or
like runnels of water interbranching through the country. A tree,
peculiar to Peru, the weeping willow of the sandy plains, bends its
long, interlaced branches, loaded with odoriferous leaves and red
berries, in the evening breeze, and a solitary palm-tree rises here and
there above clumps of olives with their pale-green foliage.

But these are only the grand outlines of the picture. Turn your eye upon
the city, or, rather, look at your feet. In the midst of the chess-board
formed by the terraces of houses, and from among the flowers with which
these are adorned, you will see rising, as from an immense bouquet,
spires, churches with domes of yellow and blue tiling, houses with walls
stained with various colors, and balconies hung with a kind of striped
cotton, which give them a trim and jaunty appearance. On one of the four
sides of the Plaza Mayor (great square) the Cathedral towers
majestically aloft. This magnificent edifice overtops the turrets of the
president's palace, a building devoid of all pretensions to
architectural beauty, and now falling to decay. It is an immense pile,
inclosing within its four walls the public offices of the government, a
prison, two barracks, a botanic garden, and the legislative chambers.
This palace occupies a whole side of the square. The _Ayuntamiento_
(Municipality) and the _Postal de las flores_, an immense market, form
the third side. The _Parian_, a market similar to the preceding,
completes the fourth. Thus the legislative and executive power, the
board of works, commerce--all the departments of the Mexican government,
in short, are in one building, and seem as if grouped together under the
shadow of the church. The people are there also; for the streets of St.
Domingo, of St. Francisco, of Tacuba, of Monnaie, of Monterilla, all
arteries of the great city, pour into the Plaza Mayor a flood of human
beings, which is always changing, and ever in motion, and you have only
to mix in this crowd for a few moments to get acquainted with Mexican
life in all its diversified phases of vice and virtue, of splendor and
misery.

When the hour of the Angelus approaches especially, horsemen,
foot-passengers, and carriages are packed together in disorderly
confusion, and gold, silk, and rags, mingled here and there, give to the
crowd a grotesque and startling appearance. The Indians are returning to
their villages, the populace to the suburbs. The _ranchero_ makes his
horse prance and curvet in the midst of the passengers, who are in no
hurry to get out of his way; the _aquador_ (water-carrier), whose day's
work is over, crosses the