Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/67

 room being used in common. Mr. and Mrs. R—— employed a cook and had their own cuisine, the others flitted about from fonda to fonda (restaurant) in search of sustenance. In the evening of each day we would meet and compare notes on the varied and amusing experiences of the day. However, I am not relating the adventures of our friends, but will generously leave that happy task to them.

Progress in furnishing our quarters in this great massive structure was slow indeed. How I longed for the delightful furnishings of my own home, which remained just as I had left it.

Fortunately for us, a druggist had two spare, pine single bedsteads, which he kindly sold to us for the sum of forty dollars. At an American factory they would have been worth about four dollars each. One was painted a bright red, the other an uncompromising orange. They were cot-like and had flat wire springs, while Mexican blankets constituted the entire bedding, mattresses and all. Pillows were improvised from bundles of wearing apparel. Fancy how they looked, the only furniture in a gorgeously frescoed room twenty-five by thirty-five feet, and of proportionate height!

Mr. and Mrs. R—— were much less fortunate than ourselves in procuring their household comforts, or rather discomforts. They ordered two cots, which were covered with a gayly striped stuff. The brilliant dyes having impaired the strength of the material, at the first attempt to lie upon these treacherous beds, both individuals found themselves suddenly precipitated upon the stone floor. No one in the house had anything in the way of bedding to lend them, and in the darkness they betook themselves to the hotel, to occupy beds of iron, proof against collapse.

A friend lent us six hair-cloth chairs, and a table which had many years before been the operating table of his brother, a surgeon. It was long, green, and sagged in the middle. A carpenter was employed to make the remaining necessary articles of furniture. He labored on the customary mañana system, and while his calculations as to time ranged all the way from eight to fifteen days, I found he actually meant from six weeks to three months. He showed samples of his