Chapter XI

What I am about to say will be of interest only to persons who for one reason or another are on the verge of a first trip to Mexico, as it will have to do chiefly with bald facts about the conditions of travel in the republic--railway trains, luggage, cabs, hotels, restaurants (there aren’t any), baths, beds, bottled water, butter--anything indeed that occurs to me as relevant to the matter of travel. I know beforehand that my attempt to make a few practical, sensible remarks on the subject will prove unsatisfactory--perhaps exasperating. After one has lived in Mexico any length of time one completely forgets the point of view of persons who have never been there. So if I happen to leave out the one thing dear reader most wishes to be informed upon, I humbly hope I may be forgiven; for if I might choose between writing about such affairs and being broken on the wheel, I should immediately inquire the nearest way to the wheel. Suggestions as to routes of travel, excursions, and “sights,” I omit deliberately, as all the Mexican railways publish attractive, illustrated folders that treat of these with much greater lucidity than I ever hope to attain.

Conventionally speaking, traveling in Mexico is uncomfortable. By this I don’t mean that a person in ordinary health is subjected to hardships, but merely that trains and hotels always lack the pleasing frills to which one is accustomed in the United States and Europe. A train is a means of transporting yourself and your belongings from one place to another and nothing else. Americans--and with reason--look upon their best trains as this and considerably more. The Mexican cars follow the American plan of a middle aisle with exits at either end, and, as in Europe, are usually of the first, second, and third class. A first-class car resembles in every respect what is known in the United States as “a coach” (as distinguished from a sleeping and a parlor car)--even to its squalor. Furthermore, as there are rarely enough of them they are almost always crowded. I have often noticed that Mexicans, generally speaking, either can afford to travel first class, or can’t afford to travel second. The second-class car is therefore sometimes comparatively empty and endurable when the other two are neither. Even after buying a first-class ticket I have more than once found it worth while to sit in a second-class car; but naturally this is not always true. Second-class cars for some reason are gradually being abolished.

In many of the larger places--the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, Puebla, Vera Cruz--you can buy tickets at the railway’s city office and then at the station check luggage at any time. It is invariably a saving of good temper, anxiety, and comfort to do so, for the ticket window at the station (surrounded by a dense crowd of the unwashed) does not open until half an hour or twenty minutes before the train leaves, and it takes longer to check luggage in Mexico than in any country in which I have traveled. The system, in its final results, is precisely that of the United States; the things are weighed, one is charged for an excess of one hundred and fifty pounds on every first-class ticket, and given in some cases a separate cardboard check for every piece, and in others a printed, filled-in receipt for all of them on a slip of paper. But why so simple a process should take so much time I have not been able to learn. Recently in Vera Cruz it required at the station of the Interoceanico railway three quarters of an hour and the combined intellectual and physical efforts of two clerks and three cargadores (working hard all the time) to furnish me with checks for six trunks and several smaller pieces. Fortunately I had gone there long before train time and was the only passenger in the station. It is but fair to admit that there was a slight hitch in the proceedings--five or six minutes--when darkness overtook us before the electric light was turned on and some one had to rush out and buy a candle in order that work could be resumed (this in one of the great seaports of the world!), but all the rest of the time was consumed in checking the trunks. For each trunk they seem to write half a page of memoranda in a book, pausing now and then to lean back and look at the ceiling as if in the throes of composing a sonnet. All things considered, it is well in Mexico to allow yourself at the railway station what would seem in other countries a foolish amount of time.

In some of the towns most visited by tourists the trains are now met by English-speaking interpreters from the various hotels, who, by taking charge of the checks and baggage, make the arrival and departure of even persons who are new to the country and speak no Spanish a simple and painless matter. When this does not happen, however, you may put yourself with perfect confidence into the hands of a licensed cargador--a licensed cargador being a porter with a numbered brass tag suspended about his neck on a string. Outside of the City of Mexico I have never known a licensed cargador who was not, in at least the practice of his profession, entirely capable and honest. He will carry your hand bags to a cab, or in places where there are no cabs, to the street car that invariably passes near the best hotels, and a short time afterwards--if you have intrusted him with your checks--arrive at the hotel with your trunks. For carrying hand bags from the train to the cab or street, twenty-five centavos is ample. The charge for taking trunks from the station to the hotel is usually fifty centavos apiece. As a measure of absolute safety, although it is hardly necessary, you may remove a cargador’s tag from his neck and keep it as a hostage until you receive your trunks. A cargador with a license is for all reasons preferable to one without. Being licensed by the city government, he has a definite status which he hesitates to imperil. By retaining his tag, or noting and remembering his number, you have an infallible means of identifying him in case your trunks should fail to arrive. But they always do arrive.

Except in the City of Mexico you are rarely tempted to get into a cab; you prefer either to walk or to make use of the street cars which will always take you anywhere worth going to. In the capital, however, although the electric-car service is excellent, cabs seem to be a necessity. They are of two classes and the cost of riding in them is fixed by law, but unless you find out beforehand from some one who is informed upon the subject exactly how much you ought to pay, the cabman will demand several times his legal fare. On fête days and Sundays, and between the hours of midnight and six in the morning, the fare is double.

If your train leaves at an early hour in the morning, you cannot get breakfast at the hotels; coffee and rolls, or pan dulce--a slightly sweetened cross between bread and cake--is usually served somewhere in the station. There are no dining cars; the train instead stops at decent intervals at stations provided with clean and adequate Chinese restaurants. Even when the train is very late there is no need of being hungry; at almost every station women and girls walk up and down the platform selling fruit, pulque, and tortillas covered with strange, smeary condiments that taste much better than they look. One of these decorated tortillas and a glass of pulque may not exactly satisfy the appetite, but they effectually kill it. Pulque--a thin fluid resembling water that has been poured into a receptacle in which a little milk had been carelessly left--tastes like a kind of degenerate buttermilk, and in the middle of a hot journey is delicious and refreshing. It is derived from the sap of the maguey plant and is often spoken of as “the national drink.” This somehow strikes me as a misnomer. Pulque is certainly peculiar to Mexico and on the highlands it is drunk in enormous quantities. But in the tierra caliente and the tierra templada where maguey does not grow, what pulque there is has to be brought from a distance and is neither good nor very popular. In the lowlands fiery derivatives of the sugar cane are much more prevalent. Although I have had irrefutable ocular evidence to the effect that pulque, when drunk in sufficient quantities, is extremely intoxicating, it is difficult after only a glass or two to believe so. But I have drunk it only in the country, where it is fresh and comparatively pure. In towns it is invariably doctored and injurious.

If you are not too warm and too tired and too cross, a Mexican railway journey is infinitely more amusing than trips by rail elsewhere. In the first place smoking, except in sleeping cars, is nowhere prohibited, and smoking would tend to promote sociability even if Mexicans on trains were not always eager to talk at any hour of the day or night. In a crowded car the volume of conversation is at times appalling. It is not perhaps deeply interesting, but it is always amiable, vivacious, and incessant, and if you show the slightest desire to participate you are never made to feel unwelcome.

The Anglo-Saxon shibboleth of travel is, I should say, neatness and reserve. We do not keep on adding to our carefully calculated luggage after we have once settled ourselves in a train, and we are not inclined to forsake our book or our magazine for a casual acquaintance unless we have some reason to believe the exchange will be profitable. Mexicans, on the other hand, are in an engaging fashion the most slovenly and expansive little travelers imaginable. For laden though they be with all manner of flimsy baggage, they impulsively buy everything that is thrust at them--if it takes up enough room and is sufficiently useless--and talk to everyone in sight.

The train, for instance, stops at a lonely station in a vast dun-colored plain, planted everywhere in straight, never-ending lines of maguey. At the foot of the bare mountains in the distance, and seen through a faint haze of dust, is the high white inclosure around the buildings of an hacienda with the tiled dome and towers of its private church glittering in the sunlight. Two antique, high-hung carriages with dusty leather curtains, each drawn by a pair of mules, are at one side of the station, and standing near by a neat mozo, with a smart straw sombrero (a Mexican hat, more than other hats takes on something of the nature of its owner), and a narrowly folded red sarape reposing--Heaven knows how; I can’t carry one that way--on his left shoulder, is holding three saddle horses. The antique carriages--they look as if they dated from the time of Maximilian, and probably do--have brought the hacendado, his imposing wife, two babies, three older children, a nurse for each baby, and two dressy, hatless young ladies, from the house to the train. One of the horses was ridden by a mozo who is to accompany the family on its travels (he, however, goes second class), the second brought the mozo who is to lead back the horse of the first, while the third--a finer animal who objects to trains and whose head has been left tightly checked for the benefit of the passengers--carried a slender young man, presumably the son, who has come to see the others off. Mamma is not yet middle-aged, but her figure--her waist line--is but a reminiscence; has passed in fact into Mexican history. She wears a heavy brown woolen skirt (the thermometer stands at about 92°), a rebozo twisted around her arms and across her back as if she were a lady Laocoon, and a shirt waist of white cashmere covered with large crimson polka dots; the kind of material that makes one feel as if a very methodical person had had the nose-bleed. Papa has on skin-tight trousers of shepherd’s plaid, a “boiled” shirt with a turned-over collar (clean--but they wilted on the drive), a plain black jacket that extends only a few inches below his belt, a flowing silk necktie of the peculiarly beautiful shade of scarlet one usually sees in the neckties of rurales, a small but businesslike revolver in a holster at his hip, and a shaggy, gray beaver sombrero embroidered around the brim in gold and silver flowers, weighing about two pounds and costing at least seventy-five or a hundred pesos. The older children--little girls--and the two dressy, hatless young ladies are in what might be called the Franco-Mexican style of traveling costume; thin summer dresses of bright pink and yellow and blue and white materials made with many little tucks and frills and ruffles, and adorned with narrow bands of coarse white lace applied in a rather irrelevant fashion with here and there a knot of soiled white satin ribbon. Besides a goodly number of venerable valises they have brought with them the usual collection of cardboard hat boxes and tenates (a kind of flexible basket without handles, made of matting). Some of their effects are informally wrapped in bath towels of pleasing hues. It takes much time, a whirlwind of talk and all the remaining space in the car, to stow away everybody and everything; then as the train moves from the station there is a shrill chorus of good-bys and a prolonged wiggling of fingers through the windows at the son on the platform.

As it is only two o’clock in the afternoon, they undoubtedly were fortified by an elaborate midday meal about an hour and a half before, but at the next station oranges are offered for sale, so papa through the window buys a dozen oranges and everybody, maids and all--except the youngest baby--eats one. A few stations farther on we pass through a kind of an oasis where flowers are grown for the market. Short sections of the trunk of a banana tree, hollowed out, stopped at both ends and filled with gardenias, are held up to the window. Everyone exclaims, “Oh qué bonitas!” and as they have more things now than they can take care of, mamma buys one of them and, after a short mental struggle, the elder of the dressy young ladies buys another.

“How fragrant they are!” you murmur as the sweet, opaque scent of the gardenias begins to join forces with the tobacco smoke and the lingering smell of the eleven oranges. Papa, delighted, at once picks out one of the largest flowers and hands it to you across the aisle. Your thanks are profuse and there is a moment of intensely interested silence while you smell it and put it in your button-hole. Then you ask mamma what they are called in Spanish, and after she tells you--repeating the name emphatically four or five times--she asks you if they grow in your country. You reply yes, but that they are expensive--costing in midwinter sometimes as much as a dollar gold apiece. This announcement creates a tremendous sensation on the part of everyone, as mamma didn’t pay a fifth of that sum for all of them. One of the dressy young ladies says she is going to count hers to see how much they would come to in the United States in midwinter; and now the bark of conversation having been successfully launched, you sail pleasantly along in it until the next station, where one of the three little girls interrupts with the exclamation that on the platform she sees some papayas. A papaya being a bulky, heavy fruit of irregular shape and the size of a large squash, papa naturally leans out of the window and acquires two--buying the second one, he explains, in case he should be disappointed in the flavor of the first. But before the opening of the papaya you excuse yourself and go into another car, for without a plate and a knife and a spoon, a papaya, like a mango, can be successfully managed only while naked in a bath tub. After it is all over, however, you return for more talk, and for days afterwards, if your destination happens to be the same, you and papa wriggle fingers at each other from passing cabs, and you and mamma and the two dressy young ladies (who still haven’t hats) bow as old friends. But about hotels----

They are, broadly speaking, of three kinds. First, the ordinary “best hotel” and next best hotel of the place, conducted by Mexicans who have gradually made concessions to progress until their establishments are equipped with electric lights, electric bells (sometimes), sanitary plumbing, wire-spring mattresses (or whatever they are called), some comfortable chairs in either the patio or the sala, and cooks whose dishes, although native in conception, are yet conservative in the matter of chile and lard. Secondly, there is the occasional hotel kept by an American family, whose advertisements emphasize the fact that here you will enjoy the delights of “American home cooking.” And, finally, there is what is known in Mexico as a mesón: a combination of lodging house for man and stable for his horses and mules.

The ordinary best and second-best hotels in Mexican towns I have grown to regard as exceedingly creditable and satisfactory places in which to abide. They are not luxurious; tiled floors, with a strip of carpet or matting at the bedside, calcimined walls without pictures, just sufficient furniture, and high, austere ceilings, are not our idea of luxury. But as long as they preserve their distinctly Mexican characteristics they are, contrary to the conventional idea of the country, above all, clean. I have rarely been in a Mexican hotel where the chambermaids (who are usually men) did not all but drive me insane with their endless mopping and dusting and scouring and polishing of my ascetic bedroom. When, however, as sometimes happens, the proprietor of the “best” hotel becomes desirous of upholstered chairs and carpets, it is well, I think, to patronize the still Mexican second best. Few things are more lovable than carpets and upholstery worn shabby by those we care for, but nothing is more squalid and repulsive than the evidence of unknown contacts paid for by the day or week. The hotels, as a rule, are of two stories built around a tiled patio, full of flowers and plants, and open to the sky. The more expensive rooms have windows looking upon the street, and in cold or gloomy weather have the advantage of being lighter and warmer than the others. In very hot weather, however, the cheap rooms--dim, windowless, and opening only on the patio--are sometimes preferable. Prices vary slightly in different places and at different seasons, but at their highest they are never really exorbitant, outside of the Capital. Board and lodging costs anywhere from two and a half to five pesos a day, according to the situation of your room, and, unlike European hotels, this includes everything. There are none of the extra charges for light, attendance, “covers,” and so on, that in Europe so annoy the American traveler. At one hotel at Cuernavaca, during the tourist season, rooms and board are as high as six pesos a day, but this lasts only a short time, and is, after all, not so ruinous as it sounds when you think of it as three American dollars rather than six Mexican pesos. For a peso or so less you can, if you wish, take a room at a hotel without board; but unless you happen to have friends in town who keep house, and with whom you constantly lunch and dine, there is no advantage in doing so, as the best restaurant is invariably that of the best hotel. When I said that there were no restaurants in Mexico, I merely meant that while the various native fondas and cafés where meals are served are sometimes clean and adequate, they do not offer any of those attractions that in the cities of Europe, and a very few cities of the United States, tempt one from one’s ordinary existence. There is in Mexico no “restaurant life” (for want of a better term), no lavishly appointed interiors where you may go to watch well-dressed people spending a great deal of money, listening to music, and eating things they are unaccustomed to at home.

The meals in Mexican hotels are: Breakfast, from about seven to half past nine, consisting of coffee, chocolate, or tea, and pan dulce or rolls. Eggs and meat are extra. To a few teaspoonfuls of excessively strong coffee is added a cupful of boiling milk. Mexican coffee is excellent in itself, but the native habit of overroasting it makes its flavor harsh. As milk is almost always boiled in Mexico, cream is unknown. Chocolate is good everywhere, although it is difficult at first to reconcile yourself to the custom, in some places, of flavoring it with cinnamon. Persons who like tea for breakfast, or at any time, should travel with their own.

At dinner--from noon to about half past two--you are given soup, sometimes fish, eggs always (cooked in any way you please), meat (beefsteak or roast beef), chicken (or another kind of meat), with salad if you ask for it, frijoles (a paste of black beans), a dessert (preserves of some sort, rarely pastry), fruit, and coffee. All of which sounds rather better than it ever is. The dinner is served in courses, and in some hotels you are expected to use the same knife and fork throughout. You never have any desire to eat or, after the first day or so, to try everything. The soups are well flavored and nourishing, the eggs are always fresh, the frijoles preserve a certain standard throughout the country, which you appreciate if you like frijoles, either the chicken or one of the meats is as a rule possible--and after all, soup, eggs, frijoles, another vegetable, a meat, lettuce, and fruit ought to be enough. The hard rolls you get everywhere are of good quality and well baked. Butter, fortunately, is almost nonexistent, as it is very bad. The only edible butter in Mexico is made in Kansas, and can be bought in convenient one-pound packages at the leading grocery stores in the City of Mexico, and also in some of the smaller towns. There is no objection whatever to your taking your own tea and butter, or anything else that contributes to your comfort, into the dining room of Mexican hotels. Except during the hours at which meals are served, you cannot get anything to eat. Persons who are accustomed to some form of refreshment before going to bed should keep it in their rooms.

Supper--from half past six until about nine o’clock--is, except for the omission of eggs, very much like dinner, although somewhat less elaborate in small places. (I employ the terms dinner and supper rather than luncheon and dinner, as they are the literal translations of the Spanish words comida and cena.)

“Don’t monkey with Mexican microbes! A stitch in time may save six weeks in the hospital! Let the other fellow run the risk of typhoid, if he wishes to!”--so runs, in part, the advertisement of a certain bottling company in Mexico. The fact that the advice is primarily intended to increase the sales of the firm in question does not render it the less sound. Mexicans are peculiarly ignorant of the principles of sanitation, and careless of them even when informed. Typhus, typhoid, and smallpox are prevalent in the City of Mexico all the year round, although, either through indifference or a reluctance to admit it, cases are not reported in the newspapers until the frequency of funerals begins to cast a universal gloom. Impure water may or may not have any bearing upon typhus and smallpox; upon typhoid, however, it has. In many of the smaller towns the water, brought as it is in pipes from a distance, is pure and healthful, but you cannot be sure of just what happens to it after it has arrived. It is far more prudent, unless you are keeping house and can boil water, to drink a pure, bottled mineral water. The most convenient--for the simple reason that it can be bought at almost any bar from end to end of the country--is the Tehuacan water (Agua Tehuacan) bottled at Tehuacan by several companies; the San Lorenzo, the Cruz Roja, and El Riego, the chemical analysis of all the waters being about the same. It is light, refreshing, absolutely pure, and bottled by machinery with every precaution. The water from the Cruz Roja spring, in fact, is not even exposed to the air from the time it enters a pipe underground to when it is forced, a moment later, into a bottle and sealed.

Few beds in Mexico have arrived at the sybaritic luxury of feather pillows. The national pillow is a narrow, long, unsympathetic contrivance tightly stuffed with hair, or something more unyielding. You should travel with your own pillow, and also with a blanket or a steamer rug. Also, few hotels have facilities for bathing. To take a bath, one goes out to a bathing establishment (there are always several), where hot and cold water, clean towels, and soap are plentiful and cheap. As the Anglo-Saxon cold bath has little relation to cleanliness, and is merely either an affectation on the part of persons who don’t enjoy it or a pleasant shock to the system on the part of those who do, it may be dispensed with or taken in a basin.

At night, hotels lock their massive front doors at ten or half past, but a porter sleeping on the floor just inside admits you at any hour. All over the world, servants like to be tipped, and the custom of tipping obtains in Mexico as elsewhere, but as yet it has remained within decent bounds. A mozo in a Mexican hotel is pleased, and sometimes surprised, by what his European or American equivalent would probably scorn.

To make a point of such trivial matters as matches, candles, keys, and door knobs will probably seem as if I were going out of my way, but in Mexico I have been the amused witness of so much real anguish occasioned by the presence or absence of these prosaic implements that in regard to them I feel a certain responsibility. Almost everywhere there are incandescent lights in Mexican hotels, but in some places the power is turned off at midnight, or half an hour later, and, as happens in all countries, the lights, at inopportune moments now and then, go out. When they do go out, you grope helplessly in darkness, for it is not customary to foresee such emergencies and supply the bedrooms with matches and candles. A candle and a box of matches in your traveling bag may never be needed, but when they are needed they are needed instantly, and you will be glad you have them. Door knobs in Mexico, for absolutely no reason whatever, are placed so near the frame of the door that it is almost impossible to grasp them without pinching your fingers, and in order to lock or unlock a door the key, as a rule, must be inserted upside down, and then turned the wrong way.

The following notice (it hung, printed and framed, in the sala of a Mexican hotel) will, I feel sure, prove of interest to the student of language:

“It is not permitted for any whatsoever motive to use this saloon to eat, or for games of ball or others that could prejudice the tranquillity of the passengers, or furthermore to remove the furnitures from their respective sites. At eleven of the clock the Administrador will usurp the right to order the extinguishment of the lamp without permitting of observations.”

The second kind of hotel (the hotel kept by an American) possesses the various defects of a Mexican establishment, with several others all its own. It is rarely as clean as a Mexican hotel, and the “home cooking” so insisted upon in the advertisements merely means that the cooking is of the kind the proprietress was accustomed to before her emigration--which does not necessarily recommend it. “American cooking” or “home cooking” is no better than any other kind of cooking when it is bad. You don’t eat through sentiment or patriotism, but through necessity. Among this class of hotel I feel it is only honest to except one at Cuernavaca, which has charming rooms, a most exquisite patio, and an “American table” about as good as that of the average New England summer boarding house.

Few Americans who are traveling for pleasure in Mexico will be likely to patronize what is known as a mesón. It would not have occurred to me to do so had I not slept in them in small towns off the line of the railway, where there is no place else to stay. When traveling on a horse or a mule, a night’s lodging for the steed is, of course, even more essential than for the rider, and the mesón, as I have said, is a combination of inn and stable. Primitive and comfortless as they often are, they have for me a fascination--the fascination of something read and thought of in childhood that in later life suddenly and unexpectedly comes true. A Mexican mesón, with its bare little bedrooms on one side of the great courtyard and its stalls for the animals on the other; with its clatter of arriving and departing mule trains, its neighing and braying and shoeing and currying, its litter of equipment and freight--saddles, bridles, preposterous spurs, pack saddles, saddle bags, saddle blankets, conical sugar loaves and casks of aguardiente from some sugar hacienda, boxes, bales, sacks of coffee--its stiff and weary travelers, its swearing, swaggering arrieros--it is the Spain of the story-books, the Spain of Don Quixote. You fall asleep at an early hour to the rhythmic crunching of mules’ teeth on cane leaves and corn, and you are awakened in the cold dark by the voice of your mozo slowly and solemnly proclaiming: “Señor, es de dia.” (It is day.)

I perhaps should not have mentioned the mesón if its attraction for me had not led me to try it in cities where there was no necessity to. Even in the cities and large towns it is still a primitive institution, but it is always inexpensive, and the rooms in those of the better class are clean. I have had a well-lighted room of ample size, with a comfortable bed, a washstand, a table, two chairs, a row of hooks to hang clothes on, and an attentive mozo usually within call, for seventy-five centavos (thirty-seven and a half cents) a day. There are no restaurants attached to these places, and absolutely no one in them speaks English.

In fact, although Mexicans are becoming more and more interested in English, and are everywhere studying the language, it is as yet not very coherently spoken by the natives with whom a traveler is likely to come in contact. A few sentences by a clerk in a shop, half a dozen disconnected words by a waiter in a hotel, are about the extent of what you hear among the working classes. And yet, with no knowledge of Spanish, you can, without mishap or difficulty, travel by rail almost anywhere in Mexico. The country is accustomed to travelers who do not speak its language, and more often than not knows instinctively and from habit what they want next. Of course, to be able to ask questions and understand the answers is both a convenience and a pleasure; but it is surprising how far a very few words of Spanish on the one hand and English on the other will carry you in comparative peace of mind. When the worst comes to the worst, as by an unforeseen combination of circumstances it sometimes does, and you are on the point of losing your reason or, what is much worse, your temper, the inevitable kind lady or kind gentleman, who is to be found in every country and who knows everything, always appears at the proper moment, asks if he can be of any assistance, and sends you on your way rejoicing. In any event, in provincial Mexico nothing unpleasant is likely to happen to you.

Just what is the attitude toward foreigners of the people in general it is difficult--impossible, even--to find out. A year or so ago, several weeks before the 16th of September (the anniversary of Hidalgo’s Declaration of Independence), it was widely announced in the newspapers of the United States that far-reaching plans had been laid by the lower classes in Mexico to observe the national festival by killing all foreigners. “Mexico for Mexicans” was to be the motto of the future. This quaint conceit--evolved, without doubt, by the pestiferous revolutionary junta in Saint Louis--was not much heard of by foreigners in Mexico; but then, in Mexico very little is heard of. A few timid persons remained at home during the day, but the day passed off without bloodshed, and the rumor was decided to have been only a rumor. That there was, however, more to it than was generally supposed (although how much more it would be impossible to find out) was evident from the fact that the Government quietly and inconspicuously took notice of it. In one place, where I have some American friends living on the edge of town--almost in the country--two rurales, heavily armed as usual, sauntered out to their houses at an early hour of the morning, and remained there all day and until late that night. As they spent the time in chatting and smoking with acquaintances who happened to pass by, it was not obvious that they were there for any especial purpose. But they were there, although they had never been there before and have never been there since. In another town a group of noisy hoodlums went at night to the house of one of the consuls (not the Spanish consul, by the way, which would have been more or less natural) with the intention of “doing something,” just what, they themselves apparently did not know. Here, also, were two rurales, and at sight of them the intentions of the little mob prudently underwent a collapse. The spokesman soon summoned sufficient courage to request that they please be allowed to break a few windows if they promised to go no farther, but the rurales replied that the first man who even stooped to pick up a stone would be shot. Whereupon the crowd retired. (It is irrelevant, but also amusing, to record that on the retreat the members of the gang got into a quarrel among themselves, during which two of them were stabbed and killed.) Beyond an admirable preparedness on the part of the Government, this proves little, as the consul in question was personally most unpopular with the people of the town. But it of course proves something--or the Government wouldn’t have been so prepared--although I find it difficult to see in it a proof of hostility toward foreigners on the part of the great mass of the Mexican people. If they do feel unkindly toward us, they are adepts in prolonged and continuous deception, for they are universally responsive to friendly overtures.

On the whole, I should not advise an invalid to go to Mexico, for I have met invalids there who, although they perhaps might not have been happy anywhere, struck me as being for many unavoidable reasons more unhappy in Mexico than they would have been had they sought a warm climate nearer home. There are a few enchanting places in Mexico where the weather is warm and reasonably equable all winter, but very few. And when Mexico is cold, it is dreary even for the robust. Its changes of temperature are sudden and penetrating, and, except in one or two hotels in the capital (an impossible place for invalids of any kind), artificial heat is practically unknown. The problem of simple, nourishing food is an insoluble problem unless you keep house; only by exercising self-restraint as regards Mexican cooking can well persons remain well. There are no hotels that in the slightest degree take into consideration the needs, the whims, the capricious hours, the endless exigencies of the sick, and anyone whose well-being is dependent upon warm rooms, good milk, quiet (the country is incessantly noisy with the noise of animals and bells and human beings), or upon all or any of the little, expensive niceties of modern civilization, had better indefinitely postpone his visit.