Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/350

 330 La Sorpresa and the Tienda Mexicana adjoin the Unità d'Italia and the Roma saloon. A Mexican militia company turns out, under the green, white, and red tricolor, on every anniversary of the national independence, the 16th of September. During the Carnival season a form of entertainment known as "Cascarone parties" prevails among the Spanish residents. The participants pelt one another with egg-shells filled with gilt and colored papers. Sometimes a canvas fort is erected in the street, and attacked and defended by means of these missiles and handfuls of flour. Such Spanish life as there is can hardly be said to have remained from the early days, since the Spanish settlement at best was infinitesimal. It has been attracted here in the mean time like other immigration. A dusky mother, smoking a cigarette, in a hammock, in a palm-thatched hut, on the Acapulco trail, told me of a son who had gone to San Francisco twenty years before and become a carpenter there. He had forgotten now, she heard, even how to speak his native language.

The Latin race seems to have been especially attracted to the country of a mild climate and original traditions like their own. But German and Scandinavian names too on the sign-boards—Russian Ivanovich and Abramovich, and Hungarian Haraszthy—show that no one blood or influence has exclusive sway. There appears to be an unusually free intermingling and giving in marriage among these various components. They are less clannish than with us. Lady Wortley Montagu remarked, at Constantinople, some hundred years ago, a similar fusion, and believed it a reason for a debased and mongrel race. But a very different class of blood mingles here from that of Orientals at Constantinople. Our much more cheerful theory is, that we are to combine the best qual-