Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/136

 here for a number of years on account of the extreme healthfulness of the climate and the benefits the doctor has received for his protracted lung troubles. As their guest during my stay in Santa Rosalia nothing was more interesting than to watch these genuine American children transformed into veritable Mexicans. So thoroughly identified were these little people with the land of their adoption that in their daily play not one word of English was spoken; every movement, tone, gesture, and expression was entirely Mexican, even to their games and plays and reboso-wrapped dolls. The baby, christened Charles, repudiated his baptismal name and clung with infantile pertinacity to its Mexican synonym of Carlos, refusing to answer to any other. The next in age, Marianita, a little tot of three and a half years, interested me greatly with her wealth of golden curls and roguish face. She would sit on my lap by the hour entertaining me with the most amusing translations of Spanish into English and vice versa. One day her father returned from the barber's with head so closely shaven as to attract the attention of Marianita. Climbing upon his chair the closer to observe the result of this tonsorial manipulation, she exclaimed, to the amusement of us all: "Mi cabeza peloncita" ("My bald-headed squash")

Within a few years, warm springs have been discovered, that are said to possess wonderful healing properties.

My desire was intense to visit these springs, which must eventually prove a great health resort, but the difficulties attending such an undertaking were inconceivable.

The Rio Concha, which it was necessary to cross in order to reach the springs, was, at that time, out of its banks, and the only substitute for a boat, excepting the railway bridge, was an ordinary dry goods box manned by a brawny Indian. If we embarked at Santa Rosalia the prospects were fair of our disembarking ten or twenty miles below that point, so swift was the current; or, worse still, our primitive bark might be upset in mid-stream and ourselves and poor "Lo" left struggling in the muddy water. As the chances of so disastrous a termination to the voyage were very great, we concluded to forego the trip.