But once in the cobble-paved village I must pay high in the "Hotel
Victor"--the larger ones being closed since anarchy had confined the
wealthy to their cities--for a billowy bed and a chicken centuries old
served by waiters in evening dress and trained-monkey manners. The free
and easy old _casa de asistencia_ of Guadalajara was far more to my
liking. But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks for a
moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering some secret to its sandy
beaches in the silence of the silver-flooded night.

It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only to Titicaca among
the lofty sheets of water of the Western world. More than five thousand
feet above the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie. Waves were
dashing high at the foot of the town in the morning. Its fishermen are
ever fearful of its fury and go to pray for a safe return from every
trip before their patron St. Peter in the twin-spired village church up
toward which the lake was surging this morning as if in anger that this
place of refuge should be granted its legitimate victims.

Its rage made the journey by water I had planned to Ribera Castellanos
inadvisable, even had an owner of one of the little open boats of the
fishermen been willing to trust himself on its treacherous bosom, and by
blazing eleven I was plodding back over the road of yesterday. The
orange vendors of Atequisa gathered around me at the station, marveling
at the strength of my legs. In the train I shared a bench with a
dignified old Mexican of the country regions, who at length lost his
reserve sufficiently to tell me of the "muy amigo gringo" whose picture
he still had on the wall of his house since the day twenty-seven years
ago when my compatriot had stopped with him on a tour of his native
State, carrying a small pack of merchandise which gave him the entree
into all houses, but which he purposely held at so high a price that