Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/496

490 I glanced across the street directly afterward, and saw a boy who had passed several times that day, selling butter, which he carried in a soap-box, the cover an odd bit of matting, and the whole suspended from his head in the usual way. Entering the zaguan, he threw down his cage, and taking the butter out—each pound wrapped in a corn-husk—laid it in rows, and gave his head a scratch, took his money from his pocket, and began to count. Over and over he counted and scratched, evidently apprehensive that his accounts would not balance. The scratching and counting went on for no inconsiderable time, his face still wearing a puzzled expression. At last the solution came in the recollection of some forgotten sale. He rose, a broad grin overspreading his heretofore perplexed face, slapped himself on the hip, laughed, hastily slung his cage on his back, threw his blanket over his shoulder, and the last I saw of him he was vocalizing his occupation: "La man-te-quil-la" ("Butter for sale").

The gritos (calls) of the street venders become each day more interesting to the stranger. Each one is separate and distinct from the other, and each one is an ancestral inheritance. In them, as everything else, the "costumbres" rule, and the appropriation by another vender of one of these gritos would receive a well-merited reprimand. But how indescribable is the long-drawn intonation, with the necessary nasal twang of these indefatigable itinerants! A word with only four syllables stretches out until one may count a hundred.

For the sake of conveying