Full download ebooks at https://ebookmeta.

com

Little Red Hen s Great Escape Elizabeth Dale

For dowload this book click link below

https://ebookmeta.com/product/little-red-hen-s-great-escape-
elizabeth-dale/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD NOW
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Little Red Riding Hood Sequoia Children S Publishing

https://ebookmeta.com/product/little-red-riding-hood-sequoia-
children-s-publishing/

Red Clay Suzie 1st Edition Jeffrey Dale Lofton

https://ebookmeta.com/product/red-clay-suzie-1st-edition-jeffrey-
dale-lofton/

Red Clay Suzie 1st Edition Jeffrey Dale Lofton

https://ebookmeta.com/product/red-clay-suzie-1st-edition-jeffrey-
dale-lofton-2/

Little Red Riding Hood Rebecca Bondor

https://ebookmeta.com/product/little-red-riding-hood-rebecca-
bondor/
Mother Hen Amy Cobb

https://ebookmeta.com/product/mother-hen-amy-cobb/

The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III 1st Edition Jens
Müller

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-great-escape-from-stalag-luft-
iii-1st-edition-jens-muller/

Little Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs 2nd Edition

Elizabeth Knowles

https://ebookmeta.com/product/little-oxford-dictionary-of-
proverbs-2nd-edition-elizabeth-knowles/

Red Velvet Little Cakes 4 1st Edition Pepper North

Paige Michaels

https://ebookmeta.com/product/red-velvet-little-cakes-4-1st-
edition-pepper-north-paige-michaels/

The Great Escape Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed
the World Kati Marton

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-great-escape-nine-jews-who-
fled-hitler-and-changed-the-world-kati-marton/
Little Red Hen’s

Great Escape
 Crabtree Publishing Company All rights reserved. N

of this publication m
www.crabtreebooks.com

reproduced, stored in
1-800-387-7650
retrieval system, or tr

in any form or by any

PMB 59051, 616 Welland Ave.
electronic, mechanica
th
350 Fifth Ave., 59 Floor St. Catharines, ON
photocopy, recording
New York, NY 10118 L2M 5V6
otherwise, without th

written permission o

copyright owner.
Published by Crabtree Publishing in 2016

The rights of Elizabet

Series editor: Melanie Palmer
to be identied as the
Series designer: Peter Scoulding
and Andrew Painter
Cover designer: Cathryn Gilbert
identied as the Illus
Series advisor: Catherine Glavina
this Work have been a
Editor: Petrice Custance

Notes to adults: Reagan Miller

First published in
Prepress technician: Ken Wright
2015 by Franklin Wat
Print production coordinator: Margaret Amy Salter
(A division of Hachet

Children’s Books)
Text © Elizabeth Dale 2015

Illustration © Andrew Painter 2015

Library and Archives Canada Library of Congress

Cataloguing in Publication Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dale, Elizabeth, 1952-, author CIP available at Library of Congress

Little Red Hen's great escape / Elizabeth Dale ;

illustrated by Andrew Painter.

(Tadpoles fairytale twists) Synchred Read-Along Version by:

Triangle Interactive LLC
Issued in print and electronic formats.
PO Box 573
ISBN 978-0-7787-2461-2 (bound).--
Prior Lake, MN 55372
The Little Red Hen was worried.

Bulldozers had arrived in the

farmyard. Holes were being dug.

Something bad was going on.

She went to see Farmer Green.

She knew he wouldn’t tell her

what was happening, so she had

to be clever.
“OK,” said the farmer.

“Be helpful while you can.”

The Little Red Hen trembled

with fear. What did he mean?

“Something terrible is happening,”

she told the pig, the lamb, and

the duck. “Please help me

f ind out what it is!”

“Not until eleven o’cluck!”

snorted the pig.

“No, thank ewe,”

laughed the lamb.

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “So are cream pitchers and slop-jars; but they are not used for the same
purposes,” Dona Rosario prettily replied.
“Sometimes they are,” he murmured to me in English as he swallowed
his drink, and I’ve often wondered just what he meant.
 XI

W HAT I am about to say will be of interest only to persons who for one
reason or another are on the verge of a first trip to Mexico, as it will
have to do chiefly with bald facts about the conditions of travel in the
republic—railway trains, luggage, cabs, hotels, restaurants (there aren’t
any), baths, beds, bottled water, butter—anything indeed that occurs to me
as relevant to the matter of travel. I know beforehand that my attempt to
make a few practical, sensible remarks on the subject will prove
unsatisfactory—perhaps exasperating. After one has lived in Mexico any
length of time one completely forgets the point of view of persons who
have never been there. So if I happen to leave out the one thing dear reader
most wishes to be informed upon, I humbly hope I may be forgiven; for if I
might choose between writing about such affairs and being broken on the
wheel, I should immediately inquire the nearest way to the wheel.
Suggestions as to routes of travel, excursions, and “sights,” I omit
deliberately, as all the Mexican railways publish attractive, illustrated
folders that treat of these with much greater lucidity than I ever hope to
attain.
Conventionally speaking, traveling in Mexico is uncomfortable. By this I
don’t mean that a person in ordinary health is subjected to hardships, but
merely that trains and hotels always lack the pleasing frills to which one is
accustomed in the United States and Europe. A train is a means of
transporting yourself and your belongings from one place to another and
nothing else. Americans—and with reason—look upon their best trains as
this and considerably more. The Mexican cars follow the American plan of
a middle aisle with exits at either end, and, as in Europe, are usually of the
first, second, and third class. A first-class car resembles in every respect
what is known in the United States as “a coach” (as distinguished from a
sleeping and a parlor car)—even to its squalor. Furthermore, as there are
rarely enough of them they are almost always crowded. I have often noticed
that Mexicans, generally speaking, either can afford to travel first class, or
can’t afford to travel second. The second-class car is therefore sometimes
comparatively empty and endurable when the other two are neither. Even
after buying a first-class ticket I have more than once found it worth while
to sit in a second-class car; but naturally this is not always true. Second-
class cars for some reason are gradually being abolished.
In many of the larger places—the City of Mexico, Guadalajara, Puebla,
Vera Cruz—you can buy tickets at the railway’s city office and then at the
station check luggage at any time. It is invariably a saving of good temper,
anxiety, and comfort to do so, for the ticket window at the station
(surrounded by a dense crowd of the unwashed) does not open until half an
hour or twenty minutes before the train leaves, and it takes longer to check
luggage in Mexico than in any country in which I have traveled. The
system, in its final results, is precisely that of the United States; the things
are weighed, one is charged for an excess of one hundred and fifty pounds
on every first-class ticket, and given in some cases a separate cardboard
check for every piece, and in others a printed, filled-in receipt for all of
them on a slip of paper. But why so simple a process should take so much
time I have not been able to learn. Recently in Vera Cruz it required at the
station of the Interoceanico railway three quarters of an hour and the
combined intellectual and physical efforts of two clerks and three
cargadores (working hard all the time) to furnish me with checks for six
trunks and several smaller pieces. Fortunately I had gone there long before
train time and was the only passenger in the station. It is but fair to admit
that there was a slight hitch in the proceedings—five or six minutes—when
darkness overtook us before the electric light was turned on and some one
had to rush out and buy a candle in order that work could be resumed (this
in one of the great seaports of the world!), but all the rest of the time was
consumed in checking the trunks. For each trunk they seem to write half a
page of memoranda in a book, pausing now and then to lean back and look
at the ceiling as if in the throes of composing a sonnet. All things
considered, it is well in Mexico to allow yourself at the railway station what
would seem in other countries a foolish amount of time.
In some of the towns most visited by tourists the trains are now met by
English-speaking interpreters from the various hotels, who, by taking
charge of the checks and baggage, make the arrival and departure of even
persons who are new to the country and speak no Spanish a simple and
painless matter. When this does not happen, however, you may put yourself
with perfect confidence into the hands of a licensed cargador—a licensed
cargador being a porter with a numbered brass tag suspended about his neck
on a string. Outside of the City of Mexico I have never known a licensed
cargador who was not, in at least the practice of his profession, entirely
capable and honest. He will carry your hand bags to a cab, or in places
where there are no cabs, to the street car that invariably passes near the best
hotels, and a short time afterwards—if you have intrusted him with your
checks—arrive at the hotel with your trunks. For carrying hand bags from
the train to the cab or street, twenty-five centavos is ample. The charge for
taking trunks from the station to the hotel is usually fifty centavos apiece.
As a measure of absolute safety, although it is hardly necessary, you may
remove a cargador’s tag from his neck and keep it as a hostage until you
receive your trunks. A cargador with a license is for all reasons preferable to
one without. Being licensed by the city government, he has a definite status
which he hesitates to imperil. By retaining his tag, or noting and
remembering his number, you have an infallible means of identifying him
in case your trunks should fail to arrive. But they always do arrive.
Except in the City of Mexico you are rarely tempted to get into a cab;
you prefer either to walk or to make use of the street cars which will always
take you anywhere worth going to. In the capital, however, although the
electric-car service is excellent, cabs seem to be a necessity. They are of
two classes and the cost of riding in them is fixed by law, but unless you
find out beforehand from some one who is informed upon the subject
exactly how much you ought to pay, the cabman will demand several times
his legal fare. On fête days and Sundays, and between the hours of midnight
and six in the morning, the fare is double.
If your train leaves at an early hour in the morning, you cannot get
breakfast at the hotels; coffee and rolls, or pan dulce—a slightly sweetened
cross between bread and cake—is usually served somewhere in the station.
There are no dining cars; the train instead stops at decent intervals at
stations provided with clean and adequate Chinese restaurants. Even when
the train is very late there is no need of being hungry; at almost every
station women and girls walk up and down the platform selling fruit,
pulque, and tortillas covered with strange, smeary condiments that taste
much better than they look. One of these decorated tortillas and a glass of
pulque may not exactly satisfy the appetite, but they effectually kill it.
Pulque—a thin fluid resembling water that has been poured into a
receptacle in which a little milk had been carelessly left—tastes like a kind
of degenerate buttermilk, and in the middle of a hot journey is delicious and
refreshing. It is derived from the sap of the maguey plant and is often
spoken of as “the national drink.” This somehow strikes me as a misnomer.
Pulque is certainly peculiar to Mexico and on the highlands it is drunk in
enormous quantities. But in the tierra caliente and the tierra templada where
maguey does not grow, what pulque there is has to be brought from a
distance and is neither good nor very popular. In the lowlands fiery
derivatives of the sugar cane are much more prevalent. Although I have had
irrefutable ocular evidence to the effect that pulque, when drunk in
sufficient quantities, is extremely intoxicating, it is difficult after only a
glass or two to believe so. But I have drunk it only in the country, where it
is fresh and comparatively pure. In towns it is invariably doctored and
injurious.
If you are not too warm and too tired and too cross, a Mexican railway
journey is infinitely more amusing than trips by rail elsewhere. In the first
place smoking, except in sleeping cars, is nowhere prohibited, and smoking
would tend to promote sociability even if Mexicans on trains were not
always eager to talk at any hour of the day or night. In a crowded car the
volume of conversation is at times appalling. It is not perhaps deeply
interesting, but it is always amiable, vivacious, and incessant, and if you
show the slightest desire to participate you are never made to feel
unwelcome.
The Anglo-Saxon shibboleth of travel is, I should say, neatness and
reserve. We do not keep on adding to our carefully calculated luggage after
we have once settled ourselves in a train, and we are not inclined to forsake
our book or our magazine for a casual acquaintance unless we have some
reason to believe the exchange will be profitable. Mexicans, on the other
hand, are in an engaging fashion the most slovenly and expansive little
travelers imaginable. For laden though they be with all manner of flimsy
baggage, they impulsively buy everything that is thrust at them—if it takes
up enough room and is sufficiently useless—and talk to everyone in sight.
The train, for instance, stops at a lonely station in a vast dun-colored
plain, planted everywhere in straight, never-ending lines of maguey. At the
foot of the bare mountains in the distance, and seen through a faint haze of
dust, is the high white inclosure around the buildings of an hacienda with
the tiled dome and towers of its private church glittering in the sunlight.
Two antique, high-hung carriages with dusty leather curtains, each drawn
by a pair of mules, are at one side of the station, and standing near by a neat
mozo, with a smart straw sombrero (a Mexican hat, more than other hats
takes on something of the nature of its owner), and a narrowly folded red
sarape reposing—Heaven knows how; I can’t carry one that way—on his
left shoulder, is holding three saddle horses. The antique carriages—they
look as if they dated from the time of Maximilian, and probably do—have
brought the hacendado, his imposing wife, two babies, three older children,
a nurse for each baby, and two dressy, hatless young ladies, from the house
to the train. One of the horses was ridden by a mozo who is to accompany
the family on its travels (he, however, goes second class), the second
brought the mozo who is to lead back the horse of the first, while the third
—a finer animal who objects to trains and whose head has been left tightly
checked for the benefit of the passengers—carried a slender young man,
presumably the son, who has come to see the others off. Mamma is not yet
middle-aged, but her figure—her waist line—is but a reminiscence; has
passed in fact into Mexican history. She wears a heavy brown woolen skirt
(the thermometer stands at about 92°), a rebozo twisted around her arms
and across her back as if she were a lady Laocoon, and a shirt waist of
white cashmere covered with large crimson polka dots; the kind of material
that makes one feel as if a very methodical person had had the nose-bleed.
Papa has on skin-tight trousers of shepherd’s plaid, a “boiled” shirt with a
turned-over collar (clean—but they wilted on the drive), a plain black jacket
that extends only a few inches below his belt, a flowing silk necktie of the
peculiarly beautiful shade of scarlet one usually sees in the neckties of
rurales, a small but businesslike revolver in a holster at his hip, and a
shaggy, gray beaver sombrero embroidered around the brim in gold and
silver flowers, weighing about two pounds and costing at least seventy-five
or a hundred pesos. The older children—little girls—and the two dressy,
hatless young ladies are in what might be called the Franco-Mexican style
of traveling costume; thin summer dresses of bright pink and yellow and
blue and white materials made with many little tucks and frills and ruffles,
and adorned with narrow bands of coarse white lace applied in a rather
irrelevant fashion with here and there a knot of soiled white satin ribbon.
Besides a goodly number of venerable valises they have brought with them
the usual collection of cardboard hat boxes and tenates (a kind of flexible
basket without handles, made of matting). Some of their effects are
informally wrapped in bath towels of pleasing hues. It takes much time, a
whirlwind of talk and all the remaining space in the car, to stow away
everybody and everything; then as the train moves from the station there is
a shrill chorus of good-bys and a prolonged wiggling of fingers through the
windows at the son on the platform.
As it is only two o’clock in the afternoon, they undoubtedly were
fortified by an elaborate midday meal about an hour and a half before, but
at the next station oranges are offered for sale, so papa through the window
buys a dozen oranges and everybody, maids and all—except the youngest
baby—eats one. A few stations farther on we pass through a kind of an oasis
where flowers are grown for the market. Short sections of the trunk of a
banana tree, hollowed out, stopped at both ends and filled with gardenias,
are held up to the window. Everyone exclaims, “Oh qué bonitas!” and as
they have more things now than they can take care of, mamma buys one of
them and, after a short mental struggle, the elder of the dressy young ladies
buys another.
“How fragrant they are!” you murmur as the sweet, opaque scent of the
gardenias begins to join forces with the tobacco smoke and the lingering
smell of the eleven oranges. Papa, delighted, at once picks out one of the
largest flowers and hands it to you across the aisle. Your thanks are profuse
and there is a moment of intensely interested silence while you smell it and
put it in your button-hole. Then you ask mamma what they are called in
Spanish, and after she tells you—repeating the name emphatically four or
five times—she asks you if they grow in your country. You reply yes, but
that they are expensive—costing in midwinter sometimes as much as a
dollar gold apiece. This announcement creates a tremendous sensation on
the part of everyone, as mamma didn’t pay a fifth of that sum for all of
them. One of the dressy young ladies says she is going to count hers to see
how much they would come to in the United States in midwinter; and now
the bark of conversation having been successfully launched, you sail
pleasantly along in it until the next station, where one of the three little girls
interrupts with the exclamation that on the platform she sees some papayas.
A papaya being a bulky, heavy fruit of irregular shape and the size of a large
squash, papa naturally leans out of the window and acquires two—buying
the second one, he explains, in case he should be disappointed in the flavor
of the first. But before the opening of the papaya you excuse yourself and
go into another car, for without a plate and a knife and a spoon, a papaya,
like a mango, can be successfully managed only while naked in a bath tub.
After it is all over, however, you return for more talk, and for days
afterwards, if your destination happens to be the same, you and papa
wriggle fingers at each other from passing cabs, and you and mamma and
the two dressy young ladies (who still haven’t hats) bow as old friends. But
about hotels——
They are, broadly speaking, of three kinds. First, the ordinary “best
hotel” and next best hotel of the place, conducted by Mexicans who have
gradually made concessions to progress until their establishments are
equipped with electric lights, electric bells (sometimes), sanitary plumbing,
wire-spring mattresses (or whatever they are called), some comfortable
chairs in either the patio or the sala, and cooks whose dishes, although
native in conception, are yet conservative in the matter of chile and lard.
Secondly, there is the occasional hotel kept by an American family, whose
advertisements emphasize the fact that here you will enjoy the delights of
“American home cooking.” And, finally, there is what is known in Mexico
as a mesón: a combination of lodging house for man and stable for his
horses and mules.
The ordinary best and second-best hotels in Mexican towns I have grown
to regard as exceedingly creditable and satisfactory places in which to
abide. They are not luxurious; tiled floors, with a strip of carpet or matting
at the bedside, calcimined walls without pictures, just sufficient furniture,
and high, austere ceilings, are not our idea of luxury. But as long as they
preserve their distinctly Mexican characteristics they are, contrary to the
conventional idea of the country, above all, clean. I have rarely been in a
Mexican hotel where the chambermaids (who are usually men) did not all
but drive me insane with their endless mopping and dusting and scouring
and polishing of my ascetic bedroom. When, however, as sometimes
happens, the proprietor of the “best” hotel becomes desirous of upholstered
chairs and carpets, it is well, I think, to patronize the still Mexican second
best. Few things are more lovable than carpets and upholstery worn shabby
by those we care for, but nothing is more squalid and repulsive than the
evidence of unknown contacts paid for by the day or week. The hotels, as a
rule, are of two stories built around a tiled patio, full of flowers and plants,
and open to the sky. The more expensive rooms have windows looking
upon the street, and in cold or gloomy weather have the advantage of being
lighter and warmer than the others. In very hot weather, however, the cheap
rooms—dim, windowless, and opening only on the patio—are sometimes
preferable. Prices vary slightly in different places and at different seasons,
but at their highest they are never really exorbitant, outside of the Capital.
Board and lodging costs anywhere from two and a half to five pesos a day,
according to the situation of your room, and, unlike European hotels, this
includes everything. There are none of the extra charges for light,
attendance, “covers,” and so on, that in Europe so annoy the American
traveler. At one hotel at Cuernavaca, during the tourist season, rooms and
board are as high as six pesos a day, but this lasts only a short time, and is,
after all, not so ruinous as it sounds when you think of it as three American
dollars rather than six Mexican pesos. For a peso or so less you can, if you
wish, take a room at a hotel without board; but unless you happen to have
friends in town who keep house, and with whom you constantly lunch and
dine, there is no advantage in doing so, as the best restaurant is invariably
that of the best hotel. When I said that there were no restaurants in Mexico,
I merely meant that while the various native fondas and cafés where meals
are served are sometimes clean and adequate, they do not offer any of those
attractions that in the cities of Europe, and a very few cities of the United
States, tempt one from one’s ordinary existence. There is in Mexico no
“restaurant life” (for want of a better term), no lavishly appointed interiors
where you may go to watch well-dressed people spending a great deal of
money, listening to music, and eating things they are unaccustomed to at
home.
The meals in Mexican hotels are: Breakfast, from about seven to half
past nine, consisting of coffee, chocolate, or tea, and pan dulce or rolls.
Eggs and meat are extra. To a few teaspoonfuls of excessively strong coffee
is added a cupful of boiling milk. Mexican coffee is excellent in itself, but
the native habit of overroasting it makes its flavor harsh. As milk is almost
always boiled in Mexico, cream is unknown. Chocolate is good
everywhere, although it is difficult at first to reconcile yourself to the
custom, in some places, of flavoring it with cinnamon. Persons who like tea
for breakfast, or at any time, should travel with their own.
At dinner—from noon to about half past two—you are given soup,
sometimes fish, eggs always (cooked in any way you please), meat
(beefsteak or roast beef), chicken (or another kind of meat), with salad if
you ask for it, frijoles (a paste of black beans), a dessert (preserves of some
sort, rarely pastry), fruit, and coffee. All of which sounds rather better than
it ever is. The dinner is served in courses, and in some hotels you are
expected to use the same knife and fork throughout. You never have any
desire to eat or, after the first day or so, to try everything. The soups are
well flavored and nourishing, the eggs are always fresh, the frijoles preserve
a certain standard throughout the country, which you appreciate if you like
frijoles, either the chicken or one of the meats is as a rule possible—and
after all, soup, eggs, frijoles, another vegetable, a meat, lettuce, and fruit
ought to be enough. The hard rolls you get everywhere are of good quality
and well baked. Butter, fortunately, is almost nonexistent, as it is very bad.
The only edible butter in Mexico is made in Kansas, and can be bought in
convenient one-pound packages at the leading grocery stores in the City of
Mexico, and also in some of the smaller towns. There is no objection
whatever to your taking your own tea and butter, or anything else that
contributes to your comfort, into the dining room of Mexican hotels. Except
during the hours at which meals are served, you cannot get anything to eat.
Persons who are accustomed to some form of refreshment before going to
bed should keep it in their rooms.
Supper—from half past six until about nine o’clock—is, except for the
omission of eggs, very much like dinner, although somewhat less elaborate
in small places. (I employ the terms dinner and supper rather than luncheon
and dinner, as they are the literal translations of the Spanish words comida
and cena.)
“Don’t monkey with Mexican microbes! A stitch in time may save six
weeks in the hospital! Let the other fellow run the risk of typhoid, if he
wishes to!”—so runs, in part, the advertisement of a certain bottling
company in Mexico. The fact that the advice is primarily intended to
increase the sales of the firm in question does not render it the less sound.
Mexicans are peculiarly ignorant of the principles of sanitation, and careless
of them even when informed. Typhus, typhoid, and smallpox are prevalent
in the City of Mexico all the year round, although, either through
indifference or a reluctance to admit it, cases are not reported in the
newspapers until the frequency of funerals begins to cast a universal gloom.
Impure water may or may not have any bearing upon typhus and smallpox;
upon typhoid, however, it has. In many of the smaller towns the water,
brought as it is in pipes from a distance, is pure and healthful, but you
cannot be sure of just what happens to it after it has arrived. It is far more
prudent, unless you are keeping house and can boil water, to drink a pure,
bottled mineral water. The most convenient—for the simple reason that it
can be bought at almost any bar from end to end of the country—is the
Tehuacan water (Agua Tehuacan) bottled at Tehuacan by several
companies; the San Lorenzo, the Cruz Roja, and El Riego, the chemical
analysis of all the waters being about the same. It is light, refreshing,
absolutely pure, and bottled by machinery with every precaution. The water
from the Cruz Roja spring, in fact, is not even exposed to the air from the
time it enters a pipe underground to when it is forced, a moment later, into a
bottle and sealed.
Few beds in Mexico have arrived at the sybaritic luxury of feather
pillows. The national pillow is a narrow, long, unsympathetic contrivance
tightly stuffed with hair, or something more unyielding. You should travel
with your own pillow, and also with a blanket or a steamer rug. Also, few
hotels have facilities for bathing. To take a bath, one goes out to a bathing
establishment (there are always several), where hot and cold water, clean
towels, and soap are plentiful and cheap. As the Anglo-Saxon cold bath has
little relation to cleanliness, and is merely either an affectation on the part of
persons who don’t enjoy it or a pleasant shock to the system on the part of
those who do, it may be dispensed with or taken in a basin.
At night, hotels lock their massive front doors at ten or half past, but a
porter sleeping on the floor just inside admits you at any hour. All over the
world, servants like to be tipped, and the custom of tipping obtains in
Mexico as elsewhere, but as yet it has remained within decent bounds. A
mozo in a Mexican hotel is pleased, and sometimes surprised, by what his
European or American equivalent would probably scorn.
To make a point of such trivial matters as matches, candles, keys, and
door knobs will probably seem as if I were going out of my way, but in
Mexico I have been the amused witness of so much real anguish occasioned
by the presence or absence of these prosaic implements that in regard to
them I feel a certain responsibility. Almost everywhere there are
incandescent lights in Mexican hotels, but in some places the power is
turned off at midnight, or half an hour later, and, as happens in all countries,
the lights, at inopportune moments now and then, go out. When they do go
out, you grope helplessly in darkness, for it is not customary to foresee such
emergencies and supply the bedrooms with matches and candles. A candle
and a box of matches in your traveling bag may never be needed, but when
they are needed they are needed instantly, and you will be glad you have
them. Door knobs in Mexico, for absolutely no reason whatever, are placed
so near the frame of the door that it is almost impossible to grasp them
without pinching your fingers, and in order to lock or unlock a door the key,
as a rule, must be inserted upside down, and then turned the wrong way.
The following notice (it hung, printed and framed, in the sala of a
Mexican hotel) will, I feel sure, prove of interest to the student of language:
“It is not permitted for any whatsoever motive to use this saloon to eat,
or for games of ball or others that could prejudice the tranquillity of the
passengers, or furthermore to remove the furnitures from their respective
sites. At eleven of the clock the Administrador will usurp the right to order
the extinguishment of the lamp without permitting of observations.”
The second kind of hotel (the hotel kept by an American) possesses the
various defects of a Mexican establishment, with several others all its own.
It is rarely as clean as a Mexican hotel, and the “home cooking” so insisted
upon in the advertisements merely means that the cooking is of the kind the
proprietress was accustomed to before her emigration—which does not
necessarily recommend it. “American cooking” or “home cooking” is no
better than any other kind of cooking when it is bad. You don’t eat through
sentiment or patriotism, but through necessity. Among this class of hotel I
feel it is only honest to except one at Cuernavaca, which has charming
rooms, a most exquisite patio, and an “American table” about as good as
that of the average New England summer boarding house.
Few Americans who are traveling for pleasure in Mexico will be likely
to patronize what is known as a mesón. It would not have occurred to me to
do so had I not slept in them in small towns off the line of the railway,
where there is no place else to stay. When traveling on a horse or a mule, a
night’s lodging for the steed is, of course, even more essential than for the
rider, and the mesón, as I have said, is a combination of inn and stable.
Primitive and comfortless as they often are, they have for me a fascination
—the fascination of something read and thought of in childhood that in later
life suddenly and unexpectedly comes true. A Mexican mesón, with its bare
little bedrooms on one side of the great courtyard and its stalls for the
animals on the other; with its clatter of arriving and departing mule trains,
its neighing and braying and shoeing and currying, its litter of equipment
and freight—saddles, bridles, preposterous spurs, pack saddles, saddle bags,
saddle blankets, conical sugar loaves and casks of aguardiente from some
sugar hacienda, boxes, bales, sacks of coffee—its stiff and weary travelers,
its swearing, swaggering arrieros—it is the Spain of the story-books, the
Spain of Don Quixote. You fall asleep at an early hour to the rhythmic
crunching of mules’ teeth on cane leaves and corn, and you are awakened in
the cold dark by the voice of your mozo slowly and solemnly proclaiming:
“Señor, es de dia.” (It is day.)
I perhaps should not have mentioned the mesón if its attraction for me
had not led me to try it in cities where there was no necessity to. Even in the
cities and large towns it is still a primitive institution, but it is always
inexpensive, and the rooms in those of the better class are clean. I have had
a well-lighted room of ample size, with a comfortable bed, a washstand, a
table, two chairs, a row of hooks to hang clothes on, and an attentive mozo
usually within call, for seventy-five centavos (thirty-seven and a half cents)
a day. There are no restaurants attached to these places, and absolutely no
one in them speaks English.
In fact, although Mexicans are becoming more and more interested in
English, and are everywhere studying the language, it is as yet not very
coherently spoken by the natives with whom a traveler is likely to come in
contact. A few sentences by a clerk in a shop, half a dozen disconnected
words by a waiter in a hotel, are about the extent of what you hear among
the working classes. And yet, with no knowledge of Spanish, you can,
without mishap or difficulty, travel by rail almost anywhere in Mexico. The
country is accustomed to travelers who do not speak its language, and more
often than not knows instinctively and from habit what they want next. Of
course, to be able to ask questions and understand the answers is both a
convenience and a pleasure; but it is surprising how far a very few words of
Spanish on the one hand and English on the other will carry you in
comparative peace of mind. When the worst comes to the worst, as by an
unforeseen combination of circumstances it sometimes does, and you are on
the point of losing your reason or, what is much worse, your temper, the
inevitable kind lady or kind gentleman, who is to be found in every country
and who knows everything, always appears at the proper moment, asks if he
can be of any assistance, and sends you on your way rejoicing. In any event,
in provincial Mexico nothing unpleasant is likely to happen to you.
Just what is the attitude toward foreigners of the people in general it is
difficult—impossible, even—to find out. A year or so ago, several weeks
before the 16th of September (the anniversary of Hidalgo’s Declaration of
Independence), it was widely announced in the newspapers of the United
States that far-reaching plans had been laid by the lower classes in Mexico
to observe the national festival by killing all foreigners. “Mexico for
Mexicans” was to be the motto of the future. This quaint conceit—evolved,
without doubt, by the pestiferous revolutionary junta in Saint Louis—was
not much heard of by foreigners in Mexico; but then, in Mexico very little
is heard of. A few timid persons remained at home during the day, but the
day passed off without bloodshed, and the rumor was decided to have been
only a rumor. That there was, however, more to it than was generally
supposed (although how much more it would be impossible to find out) was
evident from the fact that the Government quietly and inconspicuously took
notice of it. In one place, where I have some American friends living on the
edge of town—almost in the country—two rurales, heavily armed as usual,
sauntered out to their houses at an early hour of the morning, and remained
there all day and until late that night. As they spent the time in chatting and
smoking with acquaintances who happened to pass by, it was not obvious
that they were there for any especial purpose. But they were there, although
they had never been there before and have never been there since. In
another town a group of noisy hoodlums went at night to the house of one
of the consuls (not the Spanish consul, by the way, which would have been
more or less natural) with the intention of “doing something,” just what,
they themselves apparently did not know. Here, also, were two rurales, and
at sight of them the intentions of the little mob prudently underwent a
collapse. The spokesman soon summoned sufficient courage to request that
they please be allowed to break a few windows if they promised to go no
farther, but the rurales replied that the first man who even stooped to pick
up a stone would be shot. Whereupon the crowd retired. (It is irrelevant, but
also amusing, to record that on the retreat the members of the gang got into
a quarrel among themselves, during which two of them were stabbed and
killed.) Beyond an admirable preparedness on the part of the Government,
this proves little, as the consul in question was personally most unpopular
with the people of the town. But it of course proves something—or the
Government wouldn’t have been so prepared—although I find it difficult to
see in it a proof of hostility toward foreigners on the part of the great mass
of the Mexican people. If they do feel unkindly toward us, they are adepts
in prolonged and continuous deception, for they are universally responsive
to friendly overtures.
On the whole, I should not advise an invalid to go to Mexico, for I have
met invalids there who, although they perhaps might not have been happy
anywhere, struck me as being for many unavoidable reasons more unhappy
in Mexico than they would have been had they sought a warm climate
nearer home. There are a few enchanting places in Mexico where the
weather is warm and reasonably equable all winter, but very few. And when
Mexico is cold, it is dreary even for the robust. Its changes of temperature
are sudden and penetrating, and, except in one or two hotels in the capital
(an impossible place for invalids of any kind), artificial heat is practically
unknown. The problem of simple, nourishing food is an insoluble problem
unless you keep house; only by exercising self-restraint as regards Mexican
cooking can well persons remain well. There are no hotels that in the
slightest degree take into consideration the needs, the whims, the capricious
hours, the endless exigencies of the sick, and anyone whose well-being is
dependent upon warm rooms, good milk, quiet (the country is incessantly
noisy with the noise of animals and bells and human beings), or upon all or
any of the little, expensive niceties of modern civilization, had better
indefinitely postpone his visit.
 XII

A FEW days ago a friend of mine in writing to me from home said in his
letter: “I notice that now and then you refer casually to ‘an American
man’ or ‘an English woman who lives here,’ and although I know there
must be Americans and English living in Mexico as well as everywhere
else, it always gives me a feeling of incredulity to hear that there are. I
suppose I ought merely to consider the fact that you are there and then
multiply you by a hundred or a thousand—or ten thousand perhaps; I have
no idea, of course, how many. But to tell the truth I never altogether believe
that you go to Mexico when you say you do. You go somewhere, but is it
really Mexico? Why should anyone go to Mexico? It seems such a perverse
—such a positively morbid thing to do. And then, the address—that
impossible address you leave behind you! Honestly, are there any
Americans and English down there (or is it ‘up’ or ‘across’ or ‘over’—I
literally have forgotten just where it is), and if so, why are they there? What
are they like? How do they amuse themselves?”
When I read his letter I recalled an evening several years ago at my
brother’s coffee place—sixty miles from anywhere in particular. As it was
in winter, or the “dry season,” it had been raining (I don’t exaggerate), with
but one or two brief intermissions, for twenty-four days. In that part of the
republic the chief difference between the dry season and the rainy lies in the
fact that during the rainy season it rains with much regularity for a few
hours every afternoon and during the dry season it rains with even greater
regularity all the time. As the river was swollen and unfordable we had not
been able for days to send to the village—an hour’s ride away—for
provisions. Meat, of course, we did not have. In a tropical and iceless
country, unless one can have fresh meat every day, one does not have it at
all. We had run out of potatoes, we had run out of bread (baker’s bread in
Mexico is good everywhere)—we had run out of flour. There were twenty-
five or thirty chickens roosting on a convenient tree, but in our foolish,
improvident way we had allowed ourselves to become fond of the chickens
and I have an incorrigible prejudice against eating anything that has
engaged my affections when in life. So we dined on a tin of sardines, some
chile verde and a pile of tortillas, which are not bad when patted thin and
toasted to a crisp. Probably because there were forty thousand pounds of
excellent coffee piled up in sacks on the piazza, we washed down this
banquet with draughts of Sir Thomas Lipton’s mediocre tea. The evening
was cold—as bitterly cold as it can be only in a thoroughly tropical country
when the temperature drops to forty-three and a screaming wind is forcing
the rain through spaces between the tiles overhead. We had also run out of
petroleum, and the flames of the candles on the dinner table were more
often than not blue and horizontal. But somehow we dined with great
gayety and talked all the time. I remember how my brother summoned
Concha the cook, and courteously attracted her attention to the fact that she
had evidently dropped the teapot on the untiled kitchen floor—that the
spout was clogged with mud and that it did not “wish to pour,” and how he
again summoned her for the purpose of declaring that the three dead wasps
he had just fished out of the chile no doubt accounted perfectly for its
unusually delicious flavor. We had scarcely anything to eat, but socially the
dinner was a great success. Immediately afterwards we both went to bed—
each with a reading candle, a book and a hot-water bag. After half an hour’s
silence my brother irrelevantly exclaimed:
“What very agreeable people one runs across in queer, out-of-the-way
places!”
“Who on earth are you thinking of now?” I inquired.
“Why, I was thinking of us!” he placidly replied, and went on with his
reading.
Perhaps we had been agreeable. At any rate we were in a queer out-of-
the-way place, that is if any place is queer and out of the way, which I am
beginning rather to doubt. Since then I have often remembered that evening
—how, just before it grew dark, the tattered banana trees writhed like
gigantic seaweed in the wind, and the cold rain hissed from the spouts on
the roof in graceful, crystal tubes. Here and there the light of a brazero in a
laborer’s bamboo hut flared for an instant through the coffee trees. On the
piazza, the tired Indians, shivering in their flimsy, cotton garments, had
covered themselves with matting and empty coffee sacks and were trying to
sleep. In the kitchen doorway a very old, white-bearded man was
improvising poetry—sometimes sentimental, sometimes heroic, sometimes
obscene—to a huddled and enthralled audience all big hats, crimson
blankets, and beautiful eyes. Apart from this group, Saturnino was causing a
jarana to throb in a most syncopated, minor, and emotional fashion. A
jarana is a primitive guitar whose sounding board consists usually of an
armadillo’s shell. (Poor Saturnino! He is now in indefinite solitary
confinement for having, apropos of nothing except a slip of a girl,
disemboweled one of his neighbors with a machete. And he was such a
gentle, thoughtful creature! I don’t quite understand it.) During dinner we
discussed, among other things, Tolstoi’s “War and Peace” which we had just
finished, and while agreeing that it was the greatest novel we had ever read
or ever expected to read (an opinion I still possess), we did not agree about
Tolstoi’s characteristically cocksure remarks on the subject of
predestination and freedom of the will. As neither of us had studied
philosophy we were unable to command the special terminology—the
specific jargon that always makes a philosophic discussion seem so
profound, and our colloquial efforts to express ourselves were at times
piquant. In the midst of it a tarantula slithered across the tablecloth and I
squashed him with a candlestick as he was about to disappear over the
table’s edge. Of course we disputed as to whether or not, in the original
conception of the universe, God had sketched the career of the tarantula in
its relation to that of the candlestick and mine, and—yes, on looking back, I
feel sure we were both very agreeable.
But what I imagine I am trying to get at is that I have so often
wonderingly contrasted the general scene with our being there at all, and
then have remembered the simple, prosaic circumstances that had placed us
in the midst of it. In a way, it is a pity one can remember such things; the
act renders it so impossible to pose to oneself as picturesque. And,
furthermore, it tends to shake one’s belief in the picturesqueness of one’s
American and English acquaintances. (Perhaps I mean “romance” rather
than picturesqueness, for compared to the fatuity of importing
picturesqueness into Mexico, the carrying of coals to Newcastle would be a
stroke of commercial genius.) At first there seems to be something romantic
about all of one’s compatriots who live in small Mexican towns, or on far-
away ranches, plantations, fincas, haciendas—or whatever their property
happens to be called. To the newly arrived there is a sort of thrill merely in
the fashion in which they take their florid, pictorial environment for
granted. I shall not forget my first New Year’s Day in Mexico.
Until the day before, I had never been in the country, and there was
something ecstatic in the vividness of not only the day as a whole, but of
every detail of color, form, temperature, personality, and conversation. It
seemed as if everything in turn leaped out and seized hold of me, and now,
long afterwards, I recall it as one of those marvelous days without either
half tones or perspective, on which every separate fact is brilliant, and all
are of equal importance. Only once since then has Mexico had just the same
memorable effect upon me, and that was one night in the little plaza of
Jalapa when, as the front doors of the cathedral swung open and the crowd
within swarmed down the steps in the moonlight, the band abruptly crashed
into the bullfightingest part of “Carmen.”
In the tepid, springlike afternoon I pushed back a five-barred gate, and
through a pasture, where horses stopped grazing to snuff at me, over a wall
of piled stones covered with heliotrope, I strolled up between banana trees
to a yellow, stucco-covered house on the hillside. The way to the piazza was
through a tunnel of pale-yellow roses with pink centers and on the piazza
was an American lady, an American gentleman, a great many languorous-
looking chairs, and two gallons of eggnog in a bowl of Indian pottery. All of
the small Anglo-Saxon colony and a few others had been asked to drop in
during the afternoon, but I was the first to arrive, and I remember that the
necessary interchange of commonplace civilities with my hosts, the talk of
mutual acquaintances on the boat from New York and the answering of
questions about weather and politics in the United States, seemed
unspeakably shallow to one suddenly confronted by so exquisite and
sublime a view. For the view from the piazza, I hasten to add by way of
justifying two words so opposite in suggestion, was, I afterwards learned,
characteristic of the mountainous, tropical parts of Mexico, and, like most
of the views there, combined both the grandeur, the awfulness of space and
height—of eternal, untrodden snows piercing the thin blue, with the soft
velvet beauty of tropical verdure—the unimaginable delicacy and variety of
color that glows and palpitates in vast areas of tropical foliage seen at
different distances through haze and sunlight. Mountains usually have an
elemental, geologic sex of some sort, and the sex of slumbering, jungle-
covered, tropical mountains is female. There is a symmetry, a chaste
volcanic elegance about them that render them the consorts and daughters
of man-mountains like, say, the Alps, the Rockies, the mountains of the
Caucasus. At their cruelest they are rarely somber; their precipitous sides
and overhanging crags are sheathed in vegetation of a depth that refines and
softens, and the quivering lights and shadows that at times are apparently all
their substance, are the lights and shadows of those excessively
etherealized, vignetted engravings on the title pages of old gift books.
At the sloping pasture’s lower end the compact, tile-roofed, white-walled
town glared in the January sunlight—a town in a garden, or, when one for a
moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves, fields of green-gold sugar
cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps of banana trees—an all-
pervasive garden in a town. For compact as the Oriental-looking little place
was, green and purple, yellow and red sprang from its interstices
everywhere as though they had welled up from the rich plantations below
and overflowed. One gazed down upon the trees of tiny plazas, the dense
dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady, flower-filled patios and sunny,
luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and beyond, the mysterious valley melted
away in vast and ever vaster distances—the illimitable valley of a dream—a
vision—an allegory—slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly
opalescent volcanoes, the texture of gauze. Up and up and up they lifted and
swam and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and
icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible, swan-like
snow upon the peak of Orizaba. Mexico’s four, well-defined climates, from
the blazing summer of the valley, to glittering winter only some thousands
of feet above, were here, I realized, all the year round, visibly in full blast.
Then other guests began to push back the heavy gate and stroll up the
long slope, and I found myself meeting them and hearing them all talk, with
a thrill as keen—if of a different quality—as that with which I had gaped at
the view. They seemed to me then quite as unreal. There was about them an
impenetrable aura of fiction; they were the plain tales that Kipling would
have lashed to the mast had his hills been Mexican—had Simla been
Barranca.
There was the British consul—a quaint, kindly, charming little man—
who while in the act of delightedly making one pun could scarcely conceal
the eagerness and anxiety with which his mind grappled with the problem
of how to introduce the next. The French consul, too, was of the gathering,
and I don’t know why, but life, somehow, would not have seemed what it
was that day if the French consul had not been unmistakably a German. He
had brought with him a bouquet of pretty daughters whose English accent
and complexions (their mother was English) and French deportment made
of them rather fascinating racial enigmas. Mrs. Belding liked the girls but
confided to me that in general she considered the foreign manner all
“French jeune filledlesticks.” Mrs. Hammerton, a tall, distinguished-
looking, dark-haired English woman of thirty, was perishing—so Mrs.
Belding almost at once informed me—for a cigar. She had an aged mother,
had had a romance (of which no one spoke, declared Mrs. Belding as she
spoke of it), and adored Mexican cigars. Almost immediately upon my
meeting her she let me know in the prettiest, most cultivated of voices that
Mrs. Belding was in the habit of getting tight.
There were two reasons for Mrs. Hammerton’s postponing just then the
longed-for cigar. One was the Rev. Luke M. Hacket, and the other was his
wife. Mr. and Mrs. Hacket, with an ever-growing band of little Hackets, had
lived for years at Barranca at the expense of many worthy and unintelligent
persons at home. They were there, all unconscious of their insolence, for the
purpose of trying to seduce Roman Catholics away from their belief and
supplying them with another; of substituting a somewhat colorless and
unmagnetic expression of the Christian idea for one that satisfies not only
some of the Mexican’s alert senses, but his imagination as well. That these
efforts at conversion met with scarcely any success except during a few
weeks before Christmas (after which there was always an abrupt stampede
to Rome), did not much concern them as long as Mrs. Hacket’s lectures in
native costume in the basements of churches at home hypnotized the
faithful into contributing to an institution for which the term “futile” is far
too kind. As every child of the Rev. and Mrs. Luke Hacket received from
the board a salary of its own, the worthy couple had not been idle, and in
addition to this simple method of swelling their revenue, the good man did
a tidy little business in vanilla—buying that fragrant bean at much less than
its market value from the poor and ignorant Indians to whom he distributed
tracts they could not read. Whenever another little Hacket arrived, he told
the board, but the incredibly gullible body knew nothing of his interest in
the vanilla market. As I was a stranger—he took me in. That is to say, he
wished me a happy new year and “touched” me for five dollars—to go
toward the purchase of a new organ for his Sunday school. I and my money
were soon parted. Only afterwards did my hostess have a chance to tell me
that among the colony the new organ was an old joke—that for many years
tourists and visitors had contributed to its sweeter and, as yet, unheard
melodies.
What was it? What is it? No one believed in his creed nor had the
slightest interest in it. What lingering, reminiscent, perhaps in some
instances atavistic misgiving and yearning to reverence, prompted these ill-
assorted exiles to treat with a certain deference a person whom they really
laughed at? There was an unsuspected pathos in it—the pathos of a world
that involuntarily clutches at the straw it knows to be but yet a straw—the
pathos of the exile who for the moment suffers even the distasteful if it in
some way bridges the gulf between him and home. It was not politeness
that restrained Mrs. Hammerton from smoking until the Hackets at last
departed and that had caused our hostess, when she saw them coming, to
discuss seriously with her husband whether or no she should temporarily
banish the eggnog. What was it?
Mrs. Blythe, a slight, pretty woman prettily dressed had come in from
her husband’s ranch the week before for the holidays. In matter-of-fact
tones she was giving her news to Mrs. Garvin, whose son was in charge of
the town’s electric light plant.
“As a rule one doesn’t particularly mind calentura” (chills and fever),
Mrs. Blythe was saying, “although it always leaves me rather weak. But
what was so annoying this time, was the fact that Jack and I both had it at
once and there wasn’t anybody to take care of us. Delfina, the cook, chose
that moment, of all moments, to get bitten in the calf of her leg by a snake.
Horrid woman, Delfina—I’m sure she did it on purpose. Of course she was
much worse than useless, for I had to take care of her—dose her with
ammonia and cut live chickens in two and bind them on the place. You
know—the hundred and fifty things one always does when they get bitten
by snakes. If Joaquin the mayordomo had been around, I shouldn’t have
cared. He knows how to cook in a sort of way, and then, besides, I shouldn’t
have been so worried about the coffee picking. But poor Joaquin was in jail
for stabbing his wife—yes, she died—and the jefe wouldn’t let him out
although I sent in a note saying how much we needed him for the next few
weeks. It was deliberately disobliging of the jefe because we’ve had him to
dinner several times and afterwards Jack always played cards with him and
let him cheat. My temperature didn’t go above a hundred and two and a
half, but Jack’s was a hundred and five off and on for three or four days,
and when you pass the hundred mark, two and a half degrees make a great
deal of difference. He was delirious a lot of the time and of course I
couldn’t let him fuss about the kitchen stove. The worst part was having to
crawl out of bed and drag over to the tanks every afternoon to measure the
coffee when the pickers came in. With Joaquin gone, there was nobody left
who could read the lists and record the amounts. Then just as the quinine
gave out, the river rose and no one could go to the village for more. Coming
at that time of year, it was all really very annoying,” she declared lightly
and passed on to something else.
“Yes, that was how I caught this bad cold,” another woman—whose
husband manufactured coffee sacks—was explaining to some one. “There
was the worst kind of a norther that night; I would have been soaked to the
skin even if I hadn’t slipped on a stone in the dark and fallen into the brook,
and when I finally reached their hut I forgot the condition I was in. The
poor little thing—she was only four—was absolutely rigid and having
convulsion after convulsion. Her screams were frightful—it was impossible
to control her—to get her to tell what the matter was, and nobody knew
what had happened. She had simply given a shriek of terror and gone into
convulsions. There was nothing to do—but nothing—nothing. At the end of
an hour and a half she gave a final shriek and died, and when her poor little
clenched fists relaxed, we found in one of them a dead scorpion. By that
time I had begun to be very chilly and of course it ended in a bad cold. Two
lumps please and no milk.”
A servant in a starched skirt of watermelon pink and a starched white
upper garment like a dressing sack glided out to help with the tea and cakes.
A blue rebozo was draped about her neck and shoulders, her black hair
hung to within a foot and a half of the floor in two fat braids, and in it,
behind her right ear, was a pink camelia the color of her skirt. Her bare feet
were thrust into slippers without heels or backs and as she slipped about
from chair to chair they made a slight dragging sound on the tiles. Everyone
said good afternoon to her as she handed the teacups, at which she smiled
and replied in a respectful fashion that was, however, perfectly self-
possessed.
“Did you hear about those people named Jackson who were here for a
few days last month?” Mrs. Belding asked of the party in general. “You
know they ended up at Cuernavaca and took a furnished house there
meaning to stay all winter. Well, they stayed five days and then left—
furious at Mexico and everyone in it.” And she went on with considerable
art and humor to sketch the brief career of the Jacksons. While they were at
the hotel, before they took possession of their house, she told us, Mrs.
Jackson had engaged servants—a mozo, two maids and a cook. The cook
she stole from the Dressers. It wasn’t at all nice of her to steal the cook as
Mrs. Dresser had gone through a lot of bother for her about the renting of
the house and had helped her to get the other servants. But Mrs. Jackson
offered the creature two dollars more a month, and although she had lived at
the Dressers for six years, she deserted them with a low, glad cry. Poor Mrs.
Dresser rushed over to the Moons and sobbed when she told about it.
“Don’t you worry, dear,” said Mrs. Moon. “Leave that Jackson viper to
me; I’ll fix her. They move in this afternoon—I’m going up there to tea—
and I promise you that you’ll have your wall-eyed old dish-smasher
hovering over the brasero in your kitchen by noon to-morrow.”
Apparently Mrs. Moon did go to the Jacksons for tea and made herself
most agreeable. “You may not believe it, but she really can once in a
while,” Mrs. Belding interjected. And as Mrs. Jackson had been conducting
a Mexican establishment for about two hours, Mrs. Moon gave her all kinds
of advice on the way to get along with the servants, ending with: “Of course
you must never let the maids go out after dark even with their mothers, and
it’s fatal to give them breakfast. We simply don’t do it in Mexico—not so
much as a drop of coffee until noon. Breakfast always makes Mexicans
insolent.” Then Mrs. Moon, feeling that she was perhaps overdoing it, left
while she saw that Mrs. Jackson was drinking it in in great, death-dealing
gulps.
It was bad enough that night, Mrs. Belding ran on, when the cook and
one of the maids tried to go to the serenata in the plaza. On the strength of
the extra two dollars the cook had bought a new rebozo and wanted to wear
it, and as there was no reason on earth why they shouldn’t go to the
serenata, they were mystified and angry at Mrs. Jackson’s serenely
declaring “No, no,” and locking them in. But the great seal of the Jacksons’
fate was definitely affixed the next morning when Mrs. Jackson, up bright
and early, with kind firmness, refused to let them make their coffee. Half an
hour later Mrs. Moon experienced the bliss of seeing the mozo, the cook
and the two maids wandering past her house—all weeping bitterly. Long
before midday the cook was back at the Dressers; and from that moment
Mrs. Jackson was blacklisted.
For five days she struggled to engage new servants, but she was believed
to be a woman with a “bad heart.” No one would go to her. She surrendered
and left.
 I did not altogether believe this tale of Mrs. Belding’s, nor did I believe
the man who casually told us that a few weeks before, the authorities had,
just in time, interrupted a human sacrifice in an Indian village some twenty
or thirty miles up from the coast. After nearly four hundred years of
Christianity the Indians had, it seemed, dug up a large stone idol and
attempted to revert. Then, too, the remark of a young girl who had been
visiting in Vera Cruz struck me as rather incredible. “I was there for a
month,” she said. “Yes, there was some yellow fever and a great deal of
smallpox—but when you’re having a good time, who minds smallpox?” It
was all so new to me in matter and manner, so sprinkled with easy
references to objects, scenes, and conditions I had met with only in
highfalutin stories lacking the ring of truth, so ornate with “meandering”
(thank you, Robert Browning), Spanish words whose meaning I did not
know. There was also among the men much coffee talk—a whole new
world to one who has always taken for granted that coffee originates,
roasted, ground and done up in five-pound tins on a grocer’s shelves. But it
was all true even to the interrupted human sacrifice and the fact that some
of the shrubs among the roses and heliotrope near the piazza were coffee
trees. Had I never seen the little colony again I should always have
remembered it as a picturesque, romantic and delightful thing. And how—I
told myself as I sat there listening and looking—they must, away off here,
depend upon one another for society, both in a formal and in an intimate
sense! How they must come together and somewhat wistfully try to forget
Mexico in talking of home in their own language! What it is, after all, to
understand and be understood!—and all that sort of thing. If my first
afternoon with foreigners in Mexico had been my last, I should have carried
away with me a brave, bright colored little picture of much charm and some
pathos. However, since then I have spent with my compatriots in this
interesting land days innumerable.
I fear I am, for the delightful purposes of art, unfortunately unselective.
First impressions have their value; they have, indeed, very great value, and
of a kind quite their own. As my first impression of Americans in Mexico
was the kind I have just been trying to give, and as it was to me wholly
interesting and more agreeable than not, I ought, perhaps, to let it stand; but
somehow I can’t. My inartistic impulse to keep on and tell all the little I
know, instead of stopping at the right place, is too strong.
 There are said to be about thirty thousand American residents in the
Mexican Republic, and the men pursue vocations ranging from that of
tramp to that of president of great and successful business ventures. There
are American doctors and dentists, brakemen, locomotive engineers,
Pullman-car conductors, civil engineers, mining engineers, “promoters,”
grocers, hotel keepers, dealers in curios; there are American barkeepers,
lawyers, stenographers, photographers, artists, clerks, electricians, and
owners of ranches of one kind or another who grow cattle or coffee or
vanilla or sugar or rubber. Many Americans are managers of some sort—
they manage mines or plantations or railways, or the local interests of some
manufacturing or business concern in the United States. One meets
Americans—both men and women—on the streets, in hotels, in shops,
strolling or sitting in the plaza—almost everywhere in the course of the
day’s work, and in the course of the day’s play, one may drop in at the
house of some acquaintance or friend and have a cup of tea, with the usual
accompaniments, at four or half past. I am speaking now not of the City of
Mexico, whose American colony as a colony I know solely through the
“Society” notes of the Mexican Herald. From that authentic source he who
runs may read (or he who reads may run) that on almost any afternoon at
the large entertainment given by Mrs. Brooks for her popular friend, Mrs.
Crooks, punch was served at a refreshment table quaintly decorated with
smilax by the ever-charming Mrs. Snooks. That there are agreeable
Americans living in the city I am sure, because I have met some of them
elsewhere. But of American society in general there I am only competent to
suspect that, like society in most places, it is considerably less important
and entrancing in reality than it is in print.
In the smaller places, even when there are residents of the United States
in numbers sufficiently great to be regarded as a “colony,” there is
absolutely nothing that by any stretch of imagination or spread of printer’s
ink could be called “American society.” The New Year’s Day I have
mentioned seems to me now a kind of freak of nature; I am at a loss to
account for it. For since then my knowledge of Americans in the small
towns has become considerable, and they are not in the least as I supposed
they were. They do not depend upon one another; they do not come together
to talk wistfully of home in the mother tongue; they do not understand one
another, and by one another they are not understood! There is at best about
most of their exceedingly few relations an atmosphere of petty and
ungenerous gossip, and at worst a fog—a positive sand storm of enmity and
hatred through which it takes a really ludicrous amount of delicate
navigation successfully to steer oneself. As a body they simply do not meet.
There are, instead, groups of two, of three, of four, who have tea together
(other forms of entertainment are rarely attempted) chiefly for the purpose
of envitrioling the others. There are among them agreeable groups and truly
charming individuals, but when they allow themselves to assimilate at all, it
is usually in a most reluctant, acid, and malnutritious form (a singularly
repulsive figure of speech, come to think of it) that does no one any good. It
is not unamusing just at first to have a lady inform you with tremulous lips
and in a tense, white voice that if you call on Mrs. X., you must not expect
to call any longer on her; and I confess I have enjoyed learning in great
detail just why this one is no longer speaking to that, and the train of events
that led up to Mr. A.’s finally slapping the face of Mr. B. Yet there are well-
defined limits to intellectual treats of this nature, and one quickly longs for
entertainment at once less dramatic and more varied.
Among the Americans this is difficult to get, although, as I pause and
recall with gratitude and affection some of my friends in Jalapa, for
instance, I am tempted to retract this statement. The trouble lies, I feel sure,
in the fact that, having come from widely dissimilar parts of the United
States, and having had while there affiliations, in many instances, whose
slight difference is still great enough to make a great difference, they have
but little in common. And Mexican towns are utterly lacking in those
diverse interests that at home supply the women of even very small
communities with so many pleasant and harmless, if artificial, bonds. The
Mexican theater is crude and impossible—even if the fractious ladies knew
Spanish sufficiently well to follow rapid dialogue with enjoyment, which
they rarely do. The occasional traveling opera company, with one wind-
busted, middle-aged star who twenty-five years ago was rumored to have
been well received in Rio de Janeiro, is a torture; there are no notable piano
or song recitals, no King’s Daughters or other pet charities, no D. A. R.’s,
no one to interpret the “Ring and the Book,” or the “Ring of the
Niebelungen,” no one to give chafing-dish lectures or inspire enthusiasm
for things like the etchings of Whistler and the economical cremation of
garbage, the abolishment of child labor, and the encouragement of the
backyard beautiful. Beyond the slight and monotonous cares of
housekeeping on a small scale, there is little to occupy their time; there are,
in a word, no varied outlets available for their normal socio-intellectual
energies, and of course the distressing happens. Even the one or two
common bonds they might have, most unfortunately act not as bonds at all.
The “servant problem,” for instance, small as wages are, serves only to keep
them farther apart, and apparently friendship between two families engaged
in the same kind of enterprise is almost impossible. Very rarely have I seen
two coffee-growers who were not virulently jealous of each other’s
successes, and who would not, in a business way, cut each other’s throats
without a qualm if by doing so they could come out a few dollars ahead.
Indeed, from the little I have seen and the great deal I have heard of my
countrymen’s business coups in Mexico, I cannot believe that
transplantation has a tendency to elevate one’s ethics. It is, perhaps,
unnecessary to record that I know men in Mexico whose methods of
business are fastidiously honorable with Mexican and compatriot alike, but
they are extremely rare; far more rare than they are at home. If in Mexico I
were forced to choose between trusting in a business matter to the
representations of a Mexican whom I knew and liked and an American
whom I knew and liked, I should, except in one or two cases, where I
should be betting, so to speak, on a certainty, trust the Mexican.
An always interesting phase of the American in Mexico is the annual
invasion of the country, from January to March, by immense parties of
“personally conducted” tourists from the United States. In private cars—
even in private trains—they descend every few days upon the cities and
towns of chief pictorial and historic interest, and just as the American
residents of England, Germany, Italy, and France shudder at the ancient and
honorable name of “Thomas Cook and Sons,” do the Americans who have
chosen Mexico as the land of their adoption shrug and laugh at the mention
of “las turistas.” On general principles, to shrug and sneer—for in this laugh
there always lurks a sneer—merely because a hundred and fifty amiable
creatures have chosen to be herded from one end of a vast foreign country
and back again in two weeks, would seem to be narrow and pointless. But I
have grown to consider it, for principles quite specific, neither the one nor
the other. The American resident’s sneer is unfortunately a helpless,
ineffectual one, but he is without question sometimes entitled to it.
Somebody once wrote an article—perhaps it was a whole book—which
he called “The Psychology of Crowds.” I did not read it, but many years
ago, when it came out, the title imbedded itself in my mind as a
wonderfully suggestive title that didn’t suggest to me anything at all. Since
then I have had frequent occasion to excavate it, and without having read a
word of the work, I am convinced that I know exactly what the author
meant. Did he, I often wonder, ever study, in his study of crowds, a crowd
of American tourists in Mexico? What a misfortune for his book if he
neglected to! They are, it seems, composed of the most estimable units of
which one can conceive; the sort of persons who make a “world’s fair”
possible; the salt of the earth—“the backbone of the nation.” And yet when
they unite and start out on their travels, a kind of madness now and then
seizes upon them; not continuously, and sometimes not at all, but now and
then. Young girls who, at home, could be trusted on every occasion to
conduct themselves with a kind of provincial dignity; sensible, middle-aged
fathers and mothers of grown-up families, and old women with white water-
waves and gray lisle-thread gloves, will now and then, when on a tour in
Mexico, go out of their way to do things that make the very peons blush.
The great majority of tourists are, of course, quiet, well-behaved persons
who take an intelligent interest in their travels. It is to the exception I am
referring; the exception by whom the others, alas! are judged.
The least of their crimes is their suddenly acquired mania for being
conspicuous. At home, in their city side streets, their humdrum suburbs,
their placid villages, they have been content for thirty, fifty, seventy years to
pursue their various decent ways, legitimately observed and clad
appropriately to their means and station. But once arrived in the ancient
capital of Montezuma, many of them are inspired in the most astounding
fashion to attract attention to themselves. On Sunday afternoon, in the
crowded Paseo, I have seen, for instance, in cabs, undoubtedly respectable
women from my country with enormous straw sombreros on their heads,
and about their shoulders those brilliant and hideous “Mexican” sarapes—
woven for the tourist trade, it is said, in Germany. All the rest of the world
was, of course, in its Paris best, and staring at them with amazed eyes. In
Mexico the only possible circumstance under which a native woman of any
position whatever would wear a peon hat would be a hot day in the depths
of the country, were she forced to travel in an open vehicle or on horseback.
As for sarapes, they, of course, are worn only by men. The effect these
travelers produced upon the local mind was somewhat analogous to that
which a party of Mexican ladies would produce upon the mind of New York
should they decide to drive up Fifth Avenue wearing policemen’s helmets
and variegated trousers. Only Mexican women would never do the one,
while American women frequently, from motives I am at a loss to account
for, do the other.
Then, once in a small town to which large parties rarely go, I saw half a
dozen men and women suddenly detach themselves from their crowd on
being told that a certain middle-aged man, bidding good-by to some guests
at his front door, was the governor of the state. At a distance of from ten to
fifteen feet of him they deliberately focused their kodaks on the group and
pressed the button. Afterwards I asked one of the men with whom the
governor had been talking, if the governor had commented upon the matter.
“Why, yes,” was the reply. “He said, with a shrug, ‘Obviously from the
United States,’ and then went on with his conversation.”
At Tehuacan, one winter, the women in a party of between twenty and
thirty, quite innocently (although most commonly) left behind them an
odious impression that the few resident Americans who happened to be
staying at the place were powerless to eradicate. The man in charge of them
could not speak Spanish, and had with him an interpreter, a Mexican boy of
seventeen or eighteen who knew a moderate amount of English. He was a
pretty-eyed, clever-looking little person, and the women of the party had
come to treat him much as one might treat a pet animal of docile habits.
They would stroke and ruffle his shock of black hair, pinch his cheeks,
“hold hands” with him when walking through the long corridors, adjust his
red cravat if it wasn’t straight, and coquettishly struggle with one another
for the privilege of strolling with him in the garden. To me it meant no more
than a disagreeably playful exhibition of bad taste, but the Mexicans in the
hotel regarded a young man of eighteen, in his station of life, as being of a
marriageable age, which, of course, he was, and they could not be made to
see in the situation anything but that the American women were in love with
him and unable to conceal it in public. Some of them with young daughters
talked of appealing to the hotel proprietor to eject persons of this
description. In the United States a party of Mexican women would under no
circumstances hold hands with, say, a bellboy, or stroke the hair of a waiter.
In Puebla it is told that some American tourists ate their luncheon in the
cathedral, threw orange peel and sardine tins on the floor, and upon leaving
washed their hands in the holy water. I don’t vouch for this story; I merely
believe it. And by reason of such things and a hundred others, the American
resident is entitled to his sneer. For he himself, in at least his relations with