Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/422

410 This maiden of San Antonio had like natural graces, and was doomed to a like wasting of them on this desert air. What would not this group of superior girls do with the advantages of superior society? Culture and Christ would make them all beautiful within. Now they were comely of countenance; then, also, of soul. Yet perhaps they are safer and happier in this humble obscurity than if exposed to a city's culture and a city's shame. May this family be kept as godly as goodly.

The dinner was hardly equal to the handsome, youthful cooks who had prepared it. In variety it was sufficient. Four ways of preparing meat, and two of eggs; but its ways were too new for me. Soup, made by stewing fat meat in water, was eagerly drank by the coachman, but was too greasy for my palate. The two fattest parts of the meat, served up separately, were pointed out by the gentleman of the house as especially excellent. Solid junks of fat they were, and each was eaten by the cochero and his mozo as confirmatory of the landlord's judgment. The fry, and the tortillas, and the unmilked coffee, and the poor water, just made the dinner passable, and that only because I was comforted with the thought that one more meal, and Brownsville and a beefsteak were mine. The handsome cooks spoiled the broth, and a plainer face and better cuisine would have been more agreeable. Thackeray wisely omits the description of Peg's dinner.

A sign of the esteem in which the fair, fat, and forty lady of the house is held by her husband, or a token of the manner in which she rules him, is made manifest to all visitors; for is it not printed in good round letters on one of the beams that crosses the ceiling of the dining-room?