Patzcuaro is one of the laziest, drowsiest, most delightful pimples on the earth to be found in a long search. It has little in common with Uruapan. Here is not a suggestion of the tropics, but just a large Indian village of mud and adobe houses and neck-breaking, cobbled streets, a town older than time, sown on and about a hillside backed by pine-treed peaks, with several expanses of plazas, all grown to grass above their cobbled floors, shaded by enormous ash-like trees with neither flowers, shrubs, nor fountains to detract from their atmosphere of roominess. About them run _portales_, arcades with pillars that seem at least to antedate Noah, and massive stone benches green with age and water-logged with constant shade, as are also the ancient stone sidewalks under the trees and the overhanging roofs of one-story houses supported by carved beams. Along these wanders a chiefly peon population, soft-footed and silent, with a mien and manner that seems to murmur: "If I do not do it to-day there is tomorrow, and next week, and the week after." The place is charming; not to its inhabitants perhaps, but to us from a land where everything is distressingly new. 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 fanatical inhabitants, abetted by the wily priests, have named a road, "very rocky and very hilly," according to the Mexican Baedeker, leading to a knoll somewhat above the town, the "via dolorosa," and have scattered fourteen stations of plastered mud niches along the way. From the aged, half-circular, stone bench on the summit is another of the marvelous views that abound in Mexico. It was siesta-time, and not a human being was in sight to break the spell. The knoll fell away in bushy precipitousness to the plain below. As I reached the top, two trains, bound back the way I had come, left the station two miles away, one behind the other, and for a long time both were plainly visible as they wound in and out away through the foothills, yet noiseless from here as phantoms, and no blot on the landscape, since all colors, even that of a railroad cutting, blended into the soft-brown whole.