Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/57

 Every day I found some new object of interest, and after the house had been explored I spent hours gazing from the windows upon some of the strangest scenes I had ever beheld. Some were extremely pathetic and others mirth-provoking.

The young children of the lower classes, especially the girls from five to ten years, were objects of peculiar interest to me. Dozens of these were to be seen in the early morning hours going upon some family errand apparently, judging from the haste and the pottery vessels they carried. Their tangled hair, peeping out from under the rebozo, their unwashed faces and jetty eyes, their long dresses sweeping the ground — and looking like the ground itself — their little naked, pigeon-toed feet going at an even but rapid jog-trot, all formed a laughable and ridiculous picture.

Often their hands were thrust through the bars, begging money in the name of some saint for a sick person.

"Tlaco, Señorita, pa comprar la medecina para un infermo" ("A cent and a quarter, lady, to buy medicine for a sick person"). If I asked what was the matter, the reply,  Tiene mal de estomago" ("Sick at the stomach"), came with such unfailing regularity, I was forced to the conclusion that "mal de estomago''" must be an epidemic among them.

The school children came in for a profitable share of my most agreeable observations, as they presented themselves before me in all their freshness and originality.

It is not the custom for the daughters of the higher classes to appear on the street unattended. I rightly concluded, therefore, that these happy little friends of mine, who created such a fund of amusement for me, were the public-school children who belonged to the lower classes.

They passed in the mornings about eight o'clock, and returned at five in the evening. The girls wore rebozos differing from their mothers' only in size; and a surprising unanimity of style seemed to prevail.

Their hair was drawn tightly back, plaited behind, the ends