Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/325

Rh Its specialty is blasphemy. Dancing girls, with their skirts open to the knee, are placed over the altar as the angels of the sepulchre or something, and over all is the image of God the Father, a gray-bearded old man, with the triangle of gold, sign of the Trinity, over his head. No wonder the first spelling-book for children, with its alphabet and a-b, ab, condenses the Ten Commandments, and puts the first one thus: "Amaras a Dios sobre todas las cosas" (Thou shalt love God above all things). That is the whole of it. Not a hint about this idolatry, which the original expressly prohibits. The commands of Sinai are perverted to their own idolatries. I bought this little tract in the market-place. It is sold by hundreds of thousands, and that is the way the Church wrests the Scriptures, may it not be added, "to her own destruction?"

The tedium of the day was greatly relieved by a horseback ride with an English resident, Mr. George Gray. I found out him and his brother, both bachelors, one a clock-maker, one a machinist, sons of a mine-worker who came out some forty years ago. The clock vender said business was dull. "Yankees like a clock in the house; Mexicans, a saint," he said, half bitingly. But what use have they for clocks? Time is of no account with them.

His brother takes me to ride; that is, lends me a horse, and goes with me. We drive among the small proprietors, to the east and north of the town. The gardens are green with irrigation. They are full of esculents, with little patches of flowers among their honest lettuce and maize, like a pretty and not useless child among her industrious associates. It is difficult to raise wheat here. The land has to be flooded with water for a long time, and otherwise carefully nurtured, and then it produces but little. Better exchange its silver for Minnesota's wheat. Both will profit by the change.

Here are large fields laid down to chilli, a sort of pepper, almost the only condiment with their beans and cakes. Others are green, very, with alfalfa, or lucern, the favorite green food for mules and horses. It looks a little like clover, though seemingly richer and juicier. Many pastures are brown, awaiting the rain of heaven, and not that from the ground. Wells are busy. They