relieved of my unwilling bondage to courtesy. I retreated to the rear of the gazing crowd in good order. In the midst of the whirl, at my feet lay two small dogs, a white and a black, nose to nose, fast asleep. Two children, also white and black, I saw at a Southern school festival, lying on a seat in like position, head to head, fast asleep. Each suggested peace and fraternity among both dogs and men, and no distinction on account of color.
The dancing-girl was modest in her goings, which Christian (?) dancers are not. She allowed her partners none of the immodest privileges of the waltz and polka, and kept her dignity both of carriage and conduct. The ballet troupes, cancan, and even the fashionable dancing of city balls are far less chaste. Civilization could get civilized at these festas.
Gambling was going on as busily as dancing. Groups sitting on the ground were rapidly losing their centavos to the cool heads that held the pool. Thus the earnings of the girls slipped through their fathers' fingers into the hands of the Aztec John Oakhursts, who probably, like him of California, were exceedingly honorable to those they robbed, and so might well be portrayed by the over-turners of morality as the saints of their tribe.
This show saluted me on arriving at this hacienda, after a long, wearisome, but repaying ride. Let us get away from these poor creatures into the grand mountains, and draw from them the rest and strength the god-like creature man can not bestow.
It was hardly day-break when I mounted my horse, and rode through the silent streets of Guanajuato—silent only for the little season from midnight to sunrise; for no town of equal bustle have I seen in Mexico, and not many in the United States. Romantic in situation, and full of movement, it is one of the places one craves to see again.
We climb up the stone stairs, up and up, steep almost as the side of a house, looking down on the sleeping city with its fifty thousand souls. What is more lonely than a great city with all its people asleep? I have trembled with awe as that thought has struck me in a crowded population. All, as it were, dead! Every house has
