Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/421

Rh pillow-cases suggested livelier dirt below. A fashion-plate and a fancy girl of the period—a bright-colored Hartford print—set off the walls, evidently showing travel on the part of the ladies of the house or desire for it, there being no room for fashion-plates in the rebosa and skirt, which compose their usual costume.

I glanced into the kitchen, and concluded to take a nearer view. It was a farmer's kitchen, larger by far than any rancho or peon could boast of. Its high thatched roof looked cool, and the smoke from its tortilla frying-pan wandered unharmed and unharming among the rafters. The good lady, young at forty, sat on the ground, busy over her stew-pans. A daughter, of the overripe age of sixteen, was frying the tortillas, which a twelve-year-old young lady was kneading. A taller miss, between the two, was walking about in a very draggly pink skirt, and a very old daughter of, possibly, eighteen, sat on the ground, assisting her mother. Three younger girls were sitting or toddling around, and a ten-year-old was chatting with a boy of like age, while also busy with kitchen duties of the vegetable sort. I was surprised to see so large a crowd, and they were doubtless more surprised to see me, with my unwashed and unshorn face, huge sombrero, and dusty garments, peering into their common room.

But they were too near the border to be disturbed by this Yankee freedom. The good lady told me that these were all her daughters. The boy was not hers; he was an outsider. She has eight children, seven daughters. They were unusually comely, and the one just a little year beyond "young," according to our mozo, would make an impression in any society. She was as beautiful as the ragged and almost naked Apollo lad whom I had seen as near the beginning of the trip as I had this industrious and modest Venus near its end. I could easily see how my Vermont brother in Saltillo had been swept from his bachelor moorings by a rancho beauty. As she sat there on the ground frying tortillas, she made one think of Thackeray's "Peg of Limovaddy:"