this kind of cloister, officers and townsmen talk about revolutions that have been effected, or are to be effected, till the time when the almost deserted galleries serve only as a retreat for lovers, and their low whispers is all that is heard beneath the silent arcades.
I had now sauntered for a long time in the Merchants' Arcades, when the sight of a writer's stall reminded me of my business there. Among the working population of the Portales, the public writers form a considerable portion of the community. You must remember that in Mexico primary instruction is not at all general, and that the office of a public writer, among this illiterate population, has lost nothing of its primitive importance. The tractable pen of the evangelists (that is the name they bear) is required for a thousand commissions, more or less delicate, and often of the most equivocal character from the venal love-letter down to the note sent by a bravo to lure his intended victim to some secret ambuscade. The evangelist whom I had remarked among the rest of his tribe was a little squat fellow, his head almost bald, scarcely encircled with a few gray hairs. What principally drew my attention to this man was an expression of sardonic joviality which shone in his otherwise insignificant face. I was just about to make some inquiries of him about Don Tadeo, when an incident made me suddenly pause, and continue to look on in silence. A young girl came to the stall of the evangelist. The long wavy hair, which escaped in plaits from her open rebozo, her complexion of a slight umber tint, the brown shoulders that her chemise of fine linen, fringed with lace, left almost bare, her slender figure, which had never been deformed by stays, and, above all, the three short petticoats of different colors, which fell in straight
