Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/72

 hundred feet, there is a rail between four and five feet high, and of proportionable thickness, composed of gold, silver, and a small alloy of brass. This is surmounted with silver statues for candles. In front of the altar is the choir, itself a church, built of dark woods of the rarest antique carving. The altar (placed upon a marble platform, elevating it from the floor of the building, and covered with gold and silver ornaments, candlesticks and crosses,) is of wrought and polished silver; and the whole is surmounted by a small temple, in which rests the figure of the Virgin of Remedios, who enjoys the exclusive right to three petticoats; one embroidered with pearls, another with emeralds, and a third with diamonds, the value of which, I am credibly informed, is not less than three millions of dollars! This, you will recollect, is only one part of one church in Mexico, and that one said not to be the richest!

Around this splendid mine of wealth are half-naked Indians, gaping with surprise, or kneeling to the figure of some favorite saint-—the misery of the man a painful contrast with the splendor of the shrine!

Passing from the Cathedral door to the south-eastern portion of the city, you reach the outskirts, crossing, in your way, the canals from the lake. I have rarely seen such miserable suburbs; they are filled with hovels built of sun-dried bricks, often worn with the weather to the shape of holes in the mud, while on their earthen floors crawl, cook, live and multiply, the wretched-looking population of léperos.

This word, I believe, is not pure Spanish, but is derived originally, it is said, from the Castilian lepra, or leper; and although they do not suffer from that loathsome malady, they are quite as disgusting.

Blacken a man in the sun; let his hair grow long and tangled, or become filled with vermin; let him plod about the streets in all kinds of dirt for years, and never know the use of brush, or towel, or water even, except in storms; let him put on a pair of leather breeches at twenty, and wear them until forty, without change or ablution; and, over all, place a torn and blackened hat, and a tattered blanket begrimed with abominations; let him have wild eyes, and shining teeth, and features pinched by famine into sharpness; breasts bared and browned, and (if females) with two or three miniatures of the same species trotting after her, and another certainly strapped to her back: combine all these in your imagination, and you have a recipé for a Mexican lépero.

There, on the canals, around the markets and pulque shops, the Indians and these miserable outcasts hang all day long; feeding on fragments, quarrelling, drinking, stealing and lying drunk about the pavements, with their children crying with hunger around them. At night they slink off to these suburbs and coil themselves up on the damp floors of their lairs, to sleep off the effects of liquor, and to awake to another day of misery