Page:Six Months In Mexico.pdf/164

162 away from a newspaper office, and after a long time read in the same paper: "One of our respected contemporaries is authority for the story than an unknown Indian woman dropped dead on the street about two weeks ago." It needed no label "castanado" (chestnut). For a time the papers imagined they had an item.

There was an old Frenchman who made some sort of taffy and with it used to perambulate the streets crying, "Piruli." The English paper came out quoting a notice of this old fellow. In a few days they quoted another to the effect that the old fellow had died of smallpox. Then, after using space for one entire week, changing every other day the cause of the old man's death and substituting some new disease, the learned editor stated that according to all reports the old fellow was not dead at all, but had charmed some rich Mexican widow with his musical voice—or—taffy and was enjoying a honeymoon on her bank account. We even did not get peace with that, but in a few days they declared the report false and gave a new version. When we left there, five months later, they were still contradicting themselves about the old taffy-peddler.

Quite as bad was their treatment of a small forest fire located about twenty miles from the city. I was at the village at the time, and was quite amused, when the fires were extinguished after eight hours' burning, to read for two weeks after contradictory stories on it. It was still raging with renewed energy—hundreds of lives had been lost, etc., until one morning the English paper said: "According to a letter received at this office yesterday, only lasted a few hours, and our contemporaries, from whom we have been quoting, have made a big mistake. No lives were lost."

When a new member was added to the royal family of Spain the notice was clipped from a foreign paper, in which it stated clearly that the Queen Regent Christina had given birth to a boy baby. Yet it was headed: "Is it a Boy?" When it grew a little colder than usual in an interior town, they headed the item: "A Mexican Town in Danger." When Roswell P. Flower, of New York, returned from his trip to Mexico he was interviewed by some reporter, and while he said nothing in Mexico's favor he said nothing against it; so they headed the