Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/137

Rh made up from the raw cotton, spun, woven and colored. The boys do the cooking and other menial duties in turn. No work is paid for out of the place. It costs nine cents per day to board, dress, and educate each boy, or a total of thirty-six dollars per day for four hundred boys. The Municipality pays six and one quarter cents per day—when it has the funds—for the support of each, or twenty-five dollars per day, and the remainder is made up from rents of the property belonging to the School, which bring in two hundred dollars per month, and from voluntary contributions. All the earnings of each boy at any kind of work are paid over to him, and he deposits what he can, if his family do not need it for their support, in a savings box belonging to himself, kept in a common depository. "When he has grown to manhood and has his trade well learned, he goes out with the little capital he has laid by, and enters business for himself. Sometimes he has twenty dollars only, and sometimes two hundred or three hundred dollars.

The wonderful musical talent of this people is shown in the band of one hundred musicians, all boys in the school, who have earned their own instruments and have a fund in advance. A band of fifty played before us. One bright little fellow, Pedro Gallardo, twelve years of age, played the key-bugle in a style which would render him an acquisition to any military band in the United States. This band, by playing at public meetings, balls, &c., had earned six hundred dollars clear that year already. At the end of the year this fund is fairly divided. A fine old gentleman, Señor Dionisio Rodriguez, has managed this school for twenty years, giving all his time