The pulque is taken to market in pig-skins, which, though the pig himself is taken out of them, still retain his shape very accurately; and when nearly full of liquor, they roll about on their backs, and kick up the little dumpy legs that are left them, in the most comical and life-like way.

When we went away we bought the old man's acocote, and carried it home in triumph, and is it not in the Museum at Kew Gardens to this day?
_( See the illustration at page 36.)_ At the hacienda of Regla are to be seen on a large scale most of the processes which are employed in the extraction of silver from the ore--the _beneficio_, or making good, as it is called.
In the great yard, numbers of men and horses were walking round and round upon the "tortas," tarts or pies, as they are called, consisting of powdered ore mixed with water, so as to form a circular bed of mud a foot deep.

To this mud, sulphate of copper, salt, and quicksilver are added, and the men and mules walk round and round in it, mixing it thoroughly together, a process which is kept up, with occasional intervals of rest, for nearly two months.

By that time the whole of the silver has formed an amalgam with the mercury, and this amalgam is afterwards separated from the earth by being trampled under water in troughs.

We were surprised to find that men and horses could pass their lives in wading through mud containing mercury in a state of fine division without absorbing it into their bodies, but neither men nor horses suffer from it.
We happened to visit the melting-house one evening, while silver and lead were being separated by oxidizing the lead in a reverberatory furnace.