Five Months' Fine Weather in Canada, Western U.S., and Mexico.
By Mrs. E. H. Carbutt. (Sampson Low and Co.)—Naturally, one's first feeling on seeing the title of this pleasant book is incredulity. But the author, who is alive to its inevitable inci- dence, corrects this cynical doubt, and her weather-chronicle is con- vincing. Mrs. Carbutt has nothing very remarkable or original to tell, and there is no room for novel illustration in the overbeaten tracks followed by her ; but she lends an attractive personality to a familiar narrative. The most interesting portion of the book is that which relates to Mexico. We do not all know all about the vast country in which " objectionable Americans, who have made their own country too hot to hold them, take refuge, much as the English used to take refuge at Boulogne." The writer is very hard on the unfortunate Emperor Maximilian, whom she taxes freely with " vanity, cruelty, and weakness." That is certainly not the notion we entertained of him here, nor does it accord with the general testimony of his own countrymen to the qualities of the Archduke. Mexico as it is must be the jolliest of places, and the Mexicans the pleasantest of people : here is a picture which makes one wonder that they ever bother about politics at all, and also that any Government gives itself the trouble to exist :—" The natives never think of wasting money on clothes, anything does for clothes, an old sack is not at all an uncommon garment ; but they buy ices, toys, and cakes freely. It is the climate that does it, the delicious sunshine that is itself food and clothes, and makes mere existence a pleasure." Very funny and gruesome is a description of the market in the " plaza" in the capital on the Day of the Dead, when all the stalls and booths where sweets are sold appear " in character, the wares representing skeletons, coffins, death's-heads, all sorts of things funereal, when crowds of children suck sugar skulls, and the vendors keep up a cry of 'fresh skeletons.."' The author bought a skeleton ice-seller, wonderfully made in paper, for a real.
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