Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/427

Rh They generally leave the last place in debt, which is assumed by the new master. If the servant's wages be $4.00 per month, and she owes $12.00 or $25.00, as the case may be, she draws only $2.50, leaving $1.50 for her abono (amount of indebtedness).

A singular method of keeping accounts is that employed by the untutored common people. I saw an Indian on the line of a certain railway who had engaged to furnish goats' and cow's milk for the contractors. The cows' milk he purchased from another party; the account with the railway and that with the party from whom he bought the milk were kept on a stick stripped of the bark in alternate sections. Certain kinds of notches were then cut on either side, indicating pints or quarts; other notches, straight or oblique, represented quartillos (3 cents), medios (6 cents), or reales (12½ cents), the payment for the same.

An error occurred in the settlement of the accounts, which the book-keeper did not observe, but which was discovered by the Indian, and, though against himself, he would only settle according to the notches on his stick.

Customs may vary in different provinces as to the way of keeping private accounts. At the capital the lives and "costumbres" of the servants are different from those in small towns and interior cities. I append the account of a cook at Santa Rosalia, which will give an idea of the forms called librettos there used between servant and employer. In the table given below it must be stated that X crossing the line means ten dollars, and V above the line, five dollars; O crossing the line is one dollar, while a small naught above the line is half a dollar; a straight mark crossing the line (|) is a real and a short one above the line is a medio. By this it will be seen that "Gertrude Torres, under a certain date, agrees to cook and do whatever work is required of her in the house. She enters the house owing her former employer thirty-four dollars. Her new master assumes this debt, without which she could not have changed her place. Her wages are four dollars per month, and from this sum Don Santiago Stoppelli retains three dollars toward the