Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/144

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138
INDIAN EMBROIDERERS.

on lace formed by the drawing out of part of the threads in fine white goods, of which, you can buy enough for a lady's skirt, six inches wide, for five to ten dollars; worth from fifty to one hundred dollars in the United States; and statuettes, vases, and similar goods in earthenware, molded from common clay, with the hands alone, by men and women who cannot read or write, and have, in fact, no education whatever. This work is executed in a small village called Tonila, the seat of the Aztec Kings of Jalisco in the days of Cortez, fifteen miles distant, and sold around the streets. There is a place on the Plaza de Toros where they have cart-loads of every description of this earthenware, from a toy-cup to a flower-vase three feet high, for sale. They ask more for it than they do at the village where it is made, but still sell it astonishingly cheap. They have statuettes of every noted man in the country and of the world, ancient and modern, from an inch in height to two feet, all elaborately worked and colored, and many of them handsomely gilded. They will make you a statuette, a perfect facsimile of yourself in miniature, on two day's notice. Of burlesque statuary they have hundreds of specimens, and their figures representing local characters, once the celebrities of the country, are wonderful. During our civil war, an American artist produced in clay, groups representing scenes in the war, the dying sentinel, wounded to the death, the attack, etc., all of which were fine; and he gained great credit thereby; but these poor illiterate Indians can show thousands of such statuettes and groups, all fully equal or superior in execution and vivid expression. A noted and infamous character is generally represented as being carried off, bodily, by