Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/317

 Yet who can blame it? An antiquarian is not like the wise man, who found a treasure and went straightway and hid it; but he, immediately he discovers anything of value, sets up such a howl of self-glorification that the attention of the whole world is directed thereto. Then, while the excavator is absent, looking for some means of conveying his treasure out of the country, the government steps in and quietly carries it off. Thus Mexico is enriched. The government is apathetic in regard to ruins and antiquities—till somebody finds something, then it is wide awake at once. It does not even gather in the monuments, minor and greater, that lie scattered about the fields.

A case in point occurred in the summer of 1881. The Chicago Times sent out an expedition to Mexico for the purpose of unearthing buried monuments. Captain Evans, who comprised the expedition, was here two months, and during that time was not idle. He found in Tezcoco, the ancient capital of art and civilization before the conquest, a "calendar stone,"—or the half of one,—some five or six feet long and three or four wide. This stone had been discovered some six months previously by the poor man who owned the mound, yet no one in the city of Mexico knew of it till announced by Captain Evans. It is a valuable sculpture, but the Mexican government will make no attempt to house it. It will wait till some one less wary than Captain Evans comes along, purchases it of the owner, and tries to carry it away; when it reaches a railroad leading to Mexico, it will be quietly drawn into the Museum, and there remain. There is here a small collection of earthen ware, that reminds us of the exploits of a foreign archæologist in Mexico,—one who came there with a great flourish of trumpets, but who departed without a great deal of pottery.

Some of the people of Mexico are afflicted with a complaint known as the mañana fever. If you ask them anything, the answer is mañana,—to-morrow. They eat, drink, and sleep to-day, but do their work and grant their favors—mañana.

And speaking of this mañana sickness reminds me that it is contagious. The most notable instance is that of this well-known archæologist. Read his communications, and they are