Whack! It took many a thump and prod and "Bur-r-r-r-r-r-o!" to make the pretty little mouse-colored donkey he was riding keep up with me--and what did I think he paid for him? Eighteen pesos! Sí, señor, ní más ní menos. A bargain, eh? And for the other one at home, which is larger, only twenty-two pesos, and for the one _they_ stole from him, fifteen pesos and a bag of corn. And once _they_ stole all three of the _burritos_ and he ran half way to Colima and had them arrested and got the _animalitos_ back. So that now he had two oxen--pray God they were still safe--and two burros and three pieces of land and a good wife--only yesterday she fell down and broke her arm and he had had to cut sticks to tie it up and she would have to work without using it for a long time--
Whack! "Anda bur-r-r-r-r-ro!" and once he owned it he never could get himself to sell an animalito. They were sometimes useful to plow and plant anyway, and this life of _sembrar_ and _cosechar_ was just the one for him. The cities, bah!--though he had been twice to Guadalajara and only too glad to get away again--and wasn't I tired enough to try the burrito a while, I should find her pace smooth as sitting on the ground. No? Well, at least if I got tired I could come and spend the night in his _casita_, a very poor little house, to be sure, which he had built himself long ago, soon after they were married, but there I would be in my own house, and his wife--or perhaps now he himself--would _ordeñar la vaca_ and there would be fresh milk and--
So on for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road passed through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead, also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field of ripening Indian corn surely four miles long and half as wide stretching like a sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the leaf and branch shacks of its guardians. Maize, too, covered all the slope down to the mountain-girdled lake, and far, far away on a point of land, like Tyre out in the Mediterranean, the twin towers of the church of Chapala stood out against the dimming lake and the blue-gray range beyond.