Page:Six Months In Mexico.pdf/115

Rh the States, so he was a father to the grand total of one hundred children. There is another man living in Mexico who has had two wives, and who has living forty-five children. Down in a small village, out from Vera Cruz, is a father with sixty-eight children. Allowing the small average of five to a family, one can see how numerous the grandchildren would be. I am acquainted with a gentleman whose mother is but thirteen-and-a-half years older than he, and she has eighteen more of a family. It is a blessed thing that, the natives are able to live in a cane hut and exist on beans and rice, else the lists of deaths by starvation would be something dreadful.

being annoyed by the porter for two hours, who feared we would miss the train, our party of two at four o'clock in the morning started for Jalapa. Even at this unholy hour a large crowd had gathered at the station, where they busied themselves packing their luggage aboard. Every woman had one male escort, some several.

The Mexicans surveyed myself and my chaperone in amazement, but I defied their gaze and showed them that a free American girl can accommodate herself to circumstances without the aid of a man. The mozo who had carried the bothersome sachel demanded "un peso" (one dollar), which I very promptly refused, and gave him the smallest change from my purse—twenty-five cents. The seats run lengthwise, like in an ordinary street car, and a Frenchman sitting opposite, who witnessed our little transaction and my very limited knowledge of Spanish, remarked: "Well, mademoiselle, you are smarter than I. A man charged me one dollar and a half just for the same service that one rendered you, and, although I speak Spanish, I had to pay it."

The occupants of the car were the Frenchman and his wife, a musician, wife and sister-in-law, a Mexican and Frenchman solitaire, as they say here, and ourselves. It was far from daylight, so, making themselves as comfortable as possible, they all went to sleep. The Mexican women were dressed in plain black, with black veils