Now and then we passed a small station made of adoby brick. Now and then, a cluster of adoby dwellings centered about a low-roofed adoby church. At one place a half wild _rancherro_ raced along beside the train on his _broncho_, vainly trying to keep the pace and wildly waving his _sombrero_ as he fell behind. At the stations were always women and children, and the ever silent men standing like statues. They never moved, they never spoke, they never smiled; they gazed at us with blank astonishment. As we came further and further south, the extreme aridness of the landscape began to lessen. Cattle began to appear upon the plain, adoby villages became more frequent, the swarthy dark brown population became more numerous. Toward midafternoon, the towers, the high walls, the red tiled roofs of a great church, a cathedral, and a town of magnitude grew large before us. We drew up at a fine, commodious station, built of red sandstone. There, gathered to meet the train, were curious two-wheeled carts and antique carriages with high wheels, drawn by mules; many donkeys bearing burdens, some with men sitting upon their hips; a multitude of dark-faced Latins, men in high _sombreros_, the women with heads enveloped in _rebozos_ or _mantillas_. We were at the station built a mile distant from the important city of San Louis Potosí, one of the great ore-smelting centers of Mexico, and a city of sixty thousand inhabitants. In the station we dined, and I ate my first Mexican fruits, one a sort of custard apple, and all delicious.
In the car with me sat a Mexican youth, who had evidently been studying and traveling in the States. He was dressed in the height of American fashion, and bore himself as a young gentleman of means. As he stepped from the train he was enveloped in the arms of another youth of about his own age. They clasped their right hands and patted each other on the small of the back with their left hands, and kissed each other’s cheeks, and then he was similarly embraced by a big stately man, over six feet in height, with a long gray beard, who carried himself with great dignity. The two were dressed in full Mexican costume, with tight-fitting _pantaloones_ flaring at the bottom and laced with silver cording on the sides, short velvet jackets embroidered with gold lace, high felt hats with gold cords and tassels, and their monograms six inches high in burnished metal fastened on the side of the crown. Several peons seized the young man’s bags and American suit-case, and the party moved toward a six-mule carryall, set high on enormous wheels. The traveler was evidently the son of one of the great _haciendados_, whose estates lay perhaps fifty miles away. Only grandees of the first magnitude travel by carriage in Mexico.