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It was brilliant noonday when I descended and walked the mile into town. The birthplace of Jose Morelos and of Yturbide, first emperor of Mexico, sits 6200 feet above the sea and claims 37,000 inhabitants. It is warm and brown with dust. Architecturally it is Mexican, with flat roofs and none of the overhanging eaves of Patzcuaro and Uruapan.

The houses, too, were log structures with shingled four-pitched roofs, and the houses in the town were well built, cement-walled, with low-sloped, far projecting tile roofs supported on trimmed beams. One might as well have been in Patzcuaro, Uruapan, or Chilchota.

Some miles away from the town, at the far end of Lake Patzcuaro, behind the hills, lies the ancient Indian village of Tzintzuntzan, at the time of the Conquest the residence of the chief of the Tarascans and ruler of the kingdom of Michoacan, which was not subdued until ten years after the fall of Mexico. I planned to visit it next day.

The oculist had criticized it as far too small for Mexican travel. He carried himself a revolver half the size of a rifle, and filed the ends of the bullets crosswise that they might split and spread on entering a body. In the outskirts of Patzcuaro there came hurrying toward me a flushed and drunken peon youth with an immense rock in his hand.

For ten hours we rode, without even stopping for lunch, through Sabina and Pichataro, San Juan Tumbio and Ajuno, back to comfortable Patzcuaro. We have always loved the State of Tlaxcala and its quaint little capital city of the same name. For more than a dozen years its governor has been Prospero Cahuantzi, a pure-blood indian, whose native language is Aztec.

These spears are used in hunting ducks. Anciently a spear-throwing stick was widely used through Mexico; to-day it lingers in few places, the best known of which is here on Lake Patzcuaro. We easily arranged at Patzcuaro to leave for Uruapan the next morning. Although delayed beyond our proposed hour of starting, we were off at six.

To the man who has anything to do or a desire to do anything, Patzcuaro would be infernal; for him who has nothing to do but to do nothing, it is delightful. Those who wish may visit crooning old churches more aged than the plays of Shakespeare. Or one may climb to "Calvary."

The same breeze tempered the sunny stillness of the "Calvario," broken occasionally by the song of a happy shepherd boy in the shrub-clad hills and the mellow-voiced, decrepit, old church bells of Patzcuaro below.

A few stood at their doors gazing with a mild sort of interest at the corpse, which still lay in the road when I turned a corner above. Mules drag the tram-car of Patzcuaro laboriously up the three kilometers from the station to the main plaza, but gravitation serves for the down journey.

Miles before we reached the town of the same name, beautiful Lake Patzcuaro burst on our sight through a break in the hills to the left, and continued to gladden the eyes until we drew up at the station.