Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/409

 you by a dexterous flank movement of a cunning caballero manœuvring behind your back, or by the savage cavalry charge of the German bagman opposite. Seize the dish when you can, and hold on to it like grim Death with one hand, till you have filled your plate. Never mind if the lady next you looks pleadingly, piteously, upon you. She is the weaker vessel. Let her wait. Fill yourself with puchero, for you will get nothing else in the way of refreshment, save chocolate and cigars, for the next twelve hours. There is a proverb which justifies the most brutal selfishness in this regard, and which I may translate thus:

Clutch it, then, for when it has once glided away you will never see it again.

For a wonder the puchero at the diligence dinner at Sant' Augustin del Palmar was not punctual. We had had soup; we had had frijoles (black beans fried in oil), we had had a seethed kid; but no puchero made its appearance. The traveller next to me, a stout, black-whiskered man, in a full suit of black velveteen, enormous gold rings in his ears, and a parti-coloured silk sash round his waist, grew impatient.

"Caballeros," he cried, after another five minutes' delay, "I am a plain man. I am a Catalan. Juan Estrellada is well known in Barcelona. But human patience has its limits. I propose that if the puchero is not at once brought in that we rob this house and throw the landlord out of window." The proposal was a startling one; but the Catalan looked as if he meant it; and I was much moved to remark that a murmur seemingly not of disapprobation ran round the table. A gentleman in a cloak, two guests off, remarked gutturally, "Es preciso;" which may he taken as equivalent to "ditto to Mr. Burke," and to an opinion that robbing the establishment was the right kind of thing to do. You are so continually falling among thieves in Mexico that your moral sense of law grows blunted, and you feel inclined when people come to you for wool, to send them away shorn. Fortunately for the landlord the majority of the guests were philosophers, and had betaken themselves to smoking; and, fortunately for ourselves, just as the Catalan seemed to be preparing to put his resolution to the vote two sallow Indian boys came staggering in with the charger of puchero between them, and we fought for the meal like so many wolves, and I didn't come off the worst, I can assure you.

It was when I had secured, with great internal joy and contentment, the last remaining black-pudding in the dish, that I noticed that my right-hand neighbour—the Catalan was on the left—had suffered the puchero to pass. He told me that he ate but once a day; that he preferred to dine at six or seven; and that this was a fast day, too, and that he must keep his "ayuno." I had noticed him, when we alighted, clad in a black cassock and a tremendous "shovel"—which brought the Barber of Seville and Basilio to my mind at once, trotting up and down, saying his breviary, and puffing at a very big cigar. This was our Canonigo. The good old man! I can see his happy, beaming face now, his smile, calm as a mountain pool environed by tall cliffs, his clear, bright, trusting eyes. I can hear his frank, simple discourse: not very erudite, certainly, often revealing a curious inexperience of the world and its ways, but infinitely fall of candour, and modesty, and charity. He held a prebendal stall in the cathedral of San Luis Potosi, to which he was now returning, via Puebla and Mexico city, having journeyed down to Jalapa to see a brother, in high military command, who lay sick in that unwholesome city. I call him "our" Canonigo, for my friend and travelling companion, who had been separated from me by stress of company at the inn dinner-table, rejoining me, when we went into the colonnade to smoke, recognised the prebendary of San Luis Potosi as an old friend, and embraced him affectionately. The old gentleman was travelling in a rusty old berline of his own, but gave heartrending accounts of the hardships of the road he had endured since he left Jalapa. The post-houses were, indeed, very short of mules, to begin with; some thousands of those useful animals having been impressed by the French commissariat and transport corps. We had been tolerably successful in the way of mules, simply because my friend, among his other attributes, was an army contractor, and had most of the post-masters under his thumb; but the poor Canonigo had been frequently left for hours, destitute of cattle, at some wayside venta. It is not at all pleasant, I assure you, so to cool your heels and your coach wheels, while the Indian hostess sits on the ground, tearing her long black hair, and wringing her sinewy brown hands, and crying out that the Mala Gente—the brigands—are