Page:Six Months In Mexico.pdf/185

Rh fill our glasses from the elegant water bottles that grace each end of the table. One dish, containing, perhaps, cold meat, salad, red pepper, radishes, and pickled beans, is served on plates, and the first ones taken away from us, although not used. After endeavoring to swallow some of this nauseating stuff, which the natives devour with relish, the servant removes the dish, our plates, knives and forks, and another equally strange and equally detestable dish is brought on. Thus the feast continues, meanwhile breaking the penny loaf in bits and eating without a spread.

Butter, which commands $1 a pound, is never seen from one year's end to another, and jelly is an unheard of dish. The last dish, and one that is never omitted from dinner or supper, is frijoles—pronounced free-holies—consists of beans, brown ones, with a sort of gravy over them. If a Bostonian were but to visit this country his intellectual stomach, or appetite, would be sated for once. Sliced orange, covered with sugar and cinnamon, is dessert, after which comes chocolate or coffee; the former superb, the latter miserable. With the coffee the ladies and gentlemen smoke their cigarettes.

Children are really good here, their reverence for their parents being something beautiful. When entering the dining room each one kisses its mother's hand, and when she asks them if they wish such and such to eat they reply: "With your permission." Although all are smokers they could not be persuaded to take a cigarette in their mother's presence. The pulque, which is also given around with the coffee, they refuse through respect to their mother; but they drink when she is not by, and of course she is aware of the fact, and has no desire to prohibit them from it. It is just their form of respect to refrain in her presence. A Mexican could not be compelled to eat of two different dishes from one plate. Even the smallest child is proof against persuasion on this point.

The frijoles, or beans, are served on a tortilla, a sort of corn-cake baked in the shape of a buckwheat cake. Another tortilla is folded together, and answers for a spoon. After finishing the beans it is not considered proper or polite unless you eat your spoon and plate.

Every family has at least half a dozen servants. They