"You will find this a healthy country," the municipal secretary told us a little later in the evening. "Don't you notice how fat we all are? The laborers of the plantations? Ah, yes, they die—die of malaria and consumption—but it is only because they are under-fed. Tortillas and beans—sour beans at that, usually, is all they get, and besides they are beaten too much. Yes, they die, but nobody else here ever has any sickness."
Notwithstanding the accounts of Juan Hernandez, the policeman, the secretary assured us that most of the dead slaves were buried. The burying is done in the town and it costs the bosses one and one-half pesos for each burial. By charity the town puts a little bamboo cross over each grave. We strolled out in the moonlight and took a look at the graveyard. And we gasped at the acres and acres of crosses! Yes, the planters bury their dead. One would guess by those crosses that Valle Nacional were not a village of one thousand souls, but a city of one hundred thousand!
On our way to our beds in the house of the Presidente we hesitated at the sound of a weak voice hailing us. A fit of heart-breaking coughing followed and then we saw a human skeleton squatting beside the path. He wanted a penny. We gave him several, then questioned him and learned that he was one who had come to die in "The House of Pity." It was cruel to make him talk, but we did it, and in his ghastly whispering voice he managed to piece out his story between paroxysms of coughing.
His name was Angelo Echavarria, he was twenty years old and a native of Tampico. Six months previously he had been offered wages on a farm at two pesos a day, and had accepted, but only to be sold as a slave to Andres M. Rodriguez, proprietor of the plantation "Santa Fe." At the end of three months he began to
