Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/248

238 churches on the highest ridge of the town, the backbone of the back, along which it lies. We pass down a clean and narrow street; the narrower the better here, for the narrower the cooler. A few rods and we come to the market-place, the prettiest, and one of the largest, I have seen in Mexico. It is surrounded by a pillared arcade broad enough for many hucksters to sit in the cool breeze and do their petty traffic. Walk around this shaded quadrangle, not halting long in the meat department, for those raw and bloody strips that dangle by the yard are not especially attractive to sight or smell. The fruit department makes it up, however. The women sit on the ground or on a mat, their stalls being on the ground likewise. Here are oranges, water-melons, peaches, bananas, and unnumbered fruits whose names you know not, nor their natures. They are pleasant to the taste, most of them too pleasant. Beans of many sorts and colors, mats, hats, maize, toys, and knickknacks, fill up the space with wares, and make it busy all the morning with buyers and sellers.

Here, too, I bought an almanac which shows the danger there is of a Romanist eruption. It was a common little duodecimo, entitled "Calendario de Mariano Galvan Rivera, para el ano de 1873." It is the popular "Old Farmers' Almanac" of the people. Over a hundred thousand are said to be circulated. The months are filled with Church annals, and the whole is more of a Church annual than the almanac of any American church. In the middle is injected twelve pages of fine type, giving what it calls "Origen del Protestantismo." The most of it deals in harangues against the old Reformers, Luther and Calvin, and in praises of the Jesuits. But it carefully shows that it is meant for modern purposes by its introductory passages, wherein are these paragraphs:

"The political dissensions which so lamentably separate Mexicans from each other, even in the bosom of the family, were not enough for the misery of our poor Mexico. There was still wanting the far more lamentable religious schism, to which origin was given by the toleration of forms of religion which were not in the country, both whose principles and whose very names were quite