posite process. So, standing among these beggars of St. John, and buying bananas and oranges, I courteously offer each of them one. They declined the offer, all but the one laughing old woman, and a make-believe crying girl. These accepted the less in hopes of getting the greater.
The market-place of this town was in the centre of the street, and each dealer had over him or her an umbrella eight feet high, consisting of a rude pole with a ruder canvas, six to eight feet square, spread across its top. It served as a narrow covering for themselves and their fruit, though its "looped and windowed raggedness" afforded about as much sun as shade.[1]
We are near the haunts of robbers. As we leave San Juan and climb the hill on the opposite side, they will surely assail us, it is said, with clubs and stones. Farther on, at Colorado, they are more sure to attack us with revolvers and Winchester rifles, which they lately stole, half-armed, from full-armed gentlemen in a stage. So we nerve ourselves for the coming possibility. One gets out three ounces, each of sixteen dollars' value, wraps them in a paper, and shows a cleft in the coach-door, where the window drops down, into which he proposes to drop them. Another, a French Jew and jeweler, has a box of precious stones with him. He is especially afraid of the stones and the metal not so precious as his own, and nervously describes the hoot and shout. A third is a clerk, with the only gold watch in the crowd. All these are armed with revolvers. One of the group has no revolver, and no gold ounces nor watches. He finds the Petrine admonition valuable here, as elsewhere, against the putting on of gold or costly apparel, and so leaves his watch in Mexico, while, as for weapons, he must rely on woman's and a minister's weapon—the tongue.
We take in another man at St. John, and rush madly out of town, and up the moderately high and immoderately hard hill. The men of the sticks and stones do not appear. The robber, as he has always been, thus far in my history, non est. We are in
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- ↑ See illustration, p. 249.
