Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/311

Rh formal manners of the Spaniards have descended to the Mexicans. You are received cordially but carefully, and you must either be useful or known, before you are admitted into the confidence of a family. Until this occurs your reception and departure from a Mexican dwelling are quite as ceremonious as your initiation into a Masonic lodge. Bows, gestures, shrugs, grimaces, and all the ordinary rites of external politeness are plentifully bestowed on the stranger;—"But sad is the plight of the luckless knight," who imagines that these elegant formalities literally mean what the profess. Americans, especially, whose extraordinary and loose social facilities habituate them to an unrestrained intercourse with all the members of families as soon as they are either prudently or imprudently introduced to them,—are often in danger of making this

sad mistake in Mexico. Neither wealth, education, nor political position, entitle an individual in that republic to pass the threshold of distant and civil intercourse. The Mexican's house, purse, or daughter, are not at "your disposal," although he tells you that