inimitable bird calls.

As my shadow grew ungainly, the dyked path struck across a long wet
field against the black soil of which the dozens of white-clad peons
with their mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony surface.
Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road
leading directly to an immense cluster of buildings among trees. The sun
was firing the western horizon. From every direction groups of
white-garbed peons were drawing like homing pigeons toward this center
of the visible landscape. I reached it with them and, passing through
several massive gates, mounted through a corral or cobbled stable yard
with many bulky, two-wheeled carts and fully two hundred mules, then up
an inclined, cobbled way through a garden of flowers to the immense
pillared veranda with cement floor of the owner's hacienda residence.

The building was in the form of a hollow square, enclosing a flowery
patio as large as many a town plaza. Don Diego was not at home, nor
indeed were any of his immediate family, who preferred the urban
pleasures of Guadalajara. The Indian door-tender brought me to "Don
Carlos," a fat, cheerful man of forty in a white jacket, close-fitting
trousers, and an immense revolver attached to the left side of his broad
and heavily weighted cartridge-belt. I presented my letter of
introduction from an American friend of the owner and was soon entangled
in the coils of Mexican pseudo-politeness. Don Carlos tore himself
away from his priceless labors as manager of the hacienda and took me up
on the flat roof of the two-story house, from which a fine view was had
for miles in all directions; indeed, nearly a half of the estate could
be seen, with its peon villages, its broad stretches of new-plowed
fields, and the now smokeless chimney of the sugar mill among the trees.