Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/199

Rh his nose to the end of his tail." All the meat not sold fresh is dried, and sold in that shape. You see men and women squatted on the ground before a pile of sheep and goats heads and necks, dried with, the horns on, and the hair or wool still adhering to them in patches, and notice, not without a rising of the gorge, that the poor customers crowd around, and after haggling for one of them, purchase it for perhaps a cent or two, and walk off, gnawing at it as a dog would gnaw at his bone. Boiled pumpkins or calobassas are also among the staple articles of food among these poor people, and the principal article of their diet is a kind of gruel or soup made from ground corn; and they think themselves vastly fortunate if they can add to this a dried goats-head, sheeps-neck, or the nose or tail of a bullock on Sunday. How they can live and work as they do on such a diet Heaven only knows.

As a rule the people of the lower order are not dishonest, but there are many petty thieves among them. To show how far they will go in the stealing line I will mention a single fact. In a hardware store on the plaza, I noticed several grindstones fastened to the wall by chains, passed through the hole in the center, and padlocks; on inquiry, I learned that this was done to prevent their being stolen and carried off bodily by men who did not even know the use of them, but would take them in preference to almost anything else on which they could lay their hands, because they were heavier, and as they supposed, consequently more valuable.

The priests have given the authorities much trouble, but appear now to have become pretty thoroughly humbled. This was once one of their strongholds, and