Beadle's Dime Novels No. 300: The Crested Serpent — page 5: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ORESTED SERPENT. CHAPTER I. THE COILS OF THE SERPENT. Amone the mountain passes of Mexico and in her fruitful lowlands is this story laid, during the short je ip of Maximil- jan. Between Queretaro and Tula, north of the city of Mexico, in a valley like the crescent moon, that hornsin a spur of one of the innumerable mountain ranges belonging to the Sierra Madre, is the hacienda Santa Luzia, nestling in a Jabyrinth of: oaks, mesquite, magnolia and palm-trees, and surrounded by a broad prairie, and guarded in the west by the slanting moun-- tain-peak, that, although two Jeagues away, seems to overhang it as a grim giant sentinel; and in the east is the rancho.and its innumerable adobe houses and wooden Cattle-pens is, presided over by the noisy and dark-visaged vacqueros, ..The hacienda is built of rough stone, and fronted by a wooden veranda, around the slender pillds of which vines twine upward in tender intimacy, overlap the stone wall, and trail across the flat roof that covers the building. | The hacienda Santa Luozia is owned by Senor Jose Vallejo,” in violent opposition to Maximilian, although of pure Cuas- lilian extraction. It was a delightfal day in the latter part of S¢ prettier, when the heat was tempered by the cool breezes that de- scended from the mountain peaks which ribbed the land, or’ from the valleys that lay in the distance, as basins to hig elity streams, that Jose Vallejo stood upon the veranda of Santa Luzia, with his tall and ca Banga? leaning upon his — arm. gs COMIC ICD. con > ae ies ; -§ ' | whe he.