Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/284

 274 Some of the stone cabins are of respectable height and size; but quite a number are of a type too common in the land. Look in at this door, or hole in the wall, for door I saw not. It is four or five feet by two. The room is six feet by eight, short. The floor is of stone, well swept and clean. Against the back wall kneels a comely-looking, youngish-housewife, of twenty or thereabouts, over a sloping stone, on which she is kneading her tortilla dough.

It is rolled out by a stone roller about the size and shape of the kneading-pin the women of the North employ. A pile unfinished lies at the upper end of the stone; the roller flattens and curls the lower portion into thin rolls, which drop off into a small bread-trough at the foot of the stone. This afterward she takes and pats in her hands several times, and lays it on the slightly hollowed frying-pan that stands near, in the corner of this room. It is a pleasant sight and sound, the slapping the dough and frying the cakes.

This is their only work almost, except that of washing, which is very similar, being also done over a smooth sloping stone, by the side of running water, with profusion of slapping, soaping, and rinsing, but with no boiling, except of the washer-women in the hot sun. They vary making tortillas and washing with combing their long black hair, and cleaning it of its contents, and with affectionate attentions of like sort to their friends and family. Besides the tortilla-trough and stone and pan, there are in this room half a dozen earthen pots and vessels of various sizes for culinary purposes. I hardly saw aught else. No chair, no table, no book, no paper, no bed—strangest of all, no looking-glass. Six feet by eight of space, walled in on every side, with only this hole for entrance, and the young matron as cheerful as if she were the wife of Lerdo.

You get an idea here also of the stables of the land. The burning of this town has compelled the erection of new stables. There is one thing always sure of good treatment in Mexico: the horse. House and wife and children may go uncared for, but not the horse. Look at this stable of the Diligence Company. Almost four hundred feet square is it. Along one side stables are built over three hundred feet long. The face of the stable, where the