The Villages, Inhabited By A Cross Between The Original Indians And The Spaniards, Are About Twenty Miles Apart.

At one of these we always stayed for the night, sleeping in grass hammocks suspended between the posts of the verandah.

The only travellers we fell in with were a party of four Americans, returning to the Eastern States from California with the gold they had won there. They had come in our steamer to Acapulco, and had left it a few hours before we did. As the villages were so far apart we necessarily had to stop at night in the same one. The second time this happened they, having arrived first, had quartered themselves on the Alcalde or principal personage of the place. Our guide took us to the same house; and although His Worship, who had a better supply of maize for the horses, and a few more chickens to sell than the other natives, was anxious to accommodate us, the four Americans, a very rough-looking lot and armed to the teeth, wouldn't hear of it, but peremptorily bade us put up elsewhere. Our own American, who was much afraid of them, obeyed their commands without more ado. It made not the slightest difference to us, for one grass hammock is as soft as another, and the Alcalde's chickens were as tough as ours.

Before the morning start, two of the diggers, rifles in hand, came over to us and plainly told us they objected to our company. Fred, with perfect good humour, assured them we had no thought of robbing them, and that as the villages were so far apart we had no choice in the matter. However, as they wished to travel separate from us, if there should be two villages at all within suitable distances, they could stop at one and we at the other. There the matter rested. But our guide was more frightened than ever. They were four to two, he argued, for neither he nor the Mexican were armed. And there was no saying, etc., etc. . . . In short we had better stay where we were till they got through. Fred laughed at the fellow's alarm, and told him he might stop if he liked, but we meant to go on.

As usual, when we reached the next stage, the diggers were before us; and when our men began to unsaddle at a hut about fifty yards from where they were feeding their horses, one of them, the biggest blackguard to look at of the lot, and though the fiercest probably the greatest cur, shouted at us to put the saddles on again and 'get out of that.' He had warned us in the morning that they'd had enough of us, and, with a volley of oaths, advised us to be off. Fred, who was in his shirt-sleeves, listened at first with a look of surprise at such cantankerous unreasonableness; but when the ruffian fell to swear and threaten, he burst into one of his contemptuous guffaws, turned his back and began to feed his horse with a corncob.

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