Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/307

 Rh with another travelling-companion, an officer in the Customs service. When he learned that the colonel was going to the frontier, with a view, among other things, suppress the extensive smuggling carried on there, said, "You had better make your little $20,000 or $30,000 by protecting it. That will be much less trouble. The smugglers will buy up your soldiers, anyway; it amounts to the same thing."

I must not represent that the colonel was always of an oppressively serious carriage. On the contrary, he developed a vein of humor, the more amusing from the simple good-faith of those at whose expense it was generally exercised.

"Do you charge no more than this to persons of our consideration, my good woman?" he said to a peasant, whose bill was modest, though but in keeping with the primitive nature of the accommodations. "It is a species of affront, as one might say. Do you comprehend that I am a colonel in the army, and this gentleman a learned traveller, noting down the manners and customs of foreign lands? When strangers of our position come this way again understand that double what you have demanded is the least that you should take."

The woman, abashed, received double her fee, and replied that she would bear the lesson in mind for the benefit of future comers.

Again, meeting three honest-faced Indian maids, with pitchers on their heads, going to the spring, he said, "Good-day, Maria" and turning to me, in an aside, "Not that I know, from Adam, whether one of them is Maria or not." He praised glaringly, to her face, as of exceeding comeliness, a servant-maid who wore gold ear-rings and necklace, and was, perhaps, not of more than average dumpi-