Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/358

350, is a village which has successfully resisted Spanish influences and maintained its old institutions to this day. Nor is this a solitary instance. The Indians are not dying out nor losing their tribal identity; they are a hardy race, and still thrive under treatment which blotted out the islanders among whom the Spaniards first settled. They often live to be a hundred years old; the women are especially long-lived. Few of either sex are deformed.

The whole race of village Indians, Aztecs and others, are an industrious people. Men and women share in the burdens of caring for the family; a woman may work in the fields, but the heavier part of out-door labor comes on the men. They all seem to be natural burden-bearers. Those of them who are too poor to own one of their little unshod ponies, or even a "burro," will all day carry on their own backs a load of from seventy-five to a hundred pounds. They take short steps and go on their long journeys up and down hill in a jog-trot, returning satisfied if they have earned a dollar or two at most. Their peculiar tenacity of purpose is shown by the fact that they are apt to go to the very place they set out for, even though they could make as much money by selling before they reached there. A missionary tells of a poor fellow who brought a hundred pounds of charcoal to market. He had spent a week altogether cutting and burning it, carried it twenty-five miles on his back and sold it for seventy-five cents. Some of these laborers earn from twelve and a half to thirty cents a day; others, loaded with debt, work for a bare subsistence and scarcely see money from one year's end to another.

Mexico has never been a densely-populated country. On an all-day journey by rail through the State of Chihuahua the vast, grassy plain over which the road