Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 2.djvu/41

Rh or portico. He is devoted to pulque and music; for, whilst he drains his social glass in the pulqueria amid a crowd of companion leperos, he is ever ready to sing a stave or make a verse in which a spice of wit or satire is certainly found. When he has earned a dollar by toil, he quits his labor even before it is completed, in order to spend his enormous gain. His wants are so small that he may be liberal in his vices. He regards work as an odious imposition upon human nature; and, created merely to live, he takes care only of to-day leaving to-morrow to take care of itself. Prudence, he thinks, would be a manifest distrust of Providence. His food, purchased at the corner of a street from one of the peripatetic cooks, consists of a few tortillas or corncakes, steeped in a pan of Chili peppers compounded with lard. A fragment of beef or fowl sometimes gives zest to the frugal mess. His dress, of narrow cotton or leather trowsers, and a blanket which is at once, bed, bedding, coat and cloak,—is worn season after season without washing, except during the providential ablutions of rain, until the mingled attrition of dirt and time entirely destroy the materials. An occasional crime, or quarrel, which is terminated by a resort to knives and copious phlebotomy, sends him several times every year to the public prison, where he is faithfully visited, fed and consoled by his spouse or amiga. As he passes along the streets with the manacled chain-gang to sweep the town, he begs a claco with such bewitching impudence that the man who refuses the demanded alms must be insensible to humor. Like the Indian, he is remarkably skilful in imitation, and makes figures of wax or rags, which are not only singularly faithful as portraits, but possess a certain degree of grace that is worthy of an artist. Some of the tribe read and write with ease and even elegance. Among this class are to be found the evangelistas or letter writers, who, seated around the portales and side walks of the plaza, are ready, at a moment's notice, to indite a sonnet to a mistress, a petition to government, a letter to an absent husband, or a wrathful effusion to a faithless lover. Another branch of this nomadic horde is engaged in the profitable occupation of "thieving," which requires no capital in trade save nimble fingers, rapid action, and a bold look with which detection may be defied. The narrow streets and lanes of towns are the theatres in which these accomplished rogues perform. No man in Mexico dares indulge in the luxury of carrying a handherchief in his pocket. The attempt would be useless, for a lepero would appropriate it before the stranger had walked a square. Upon one occasion a hat was actually taken off an Englishman's