fierce and brilliant life. Now it was moribund. The drug store,
the two bar-rooms, the hotel at the corner of the old Plaza, and
the shops where Mexican "curios" were sold to those occasional
Eastern tourists who came to visit the Mission of San Juan,
sufficed for the town's activity.

At Solotari's, the restaurant on the Plaza, diagonally across
from the hotel, Presley ate his long-deferred Mexican dinner--an
omelette in Spanish-Mexican style, frijoles and tortillas, a
salad, and a glass of white wine. In a corner of the room,
during the whole course of his dinner, two young Mexicans (one of
whom was astonishingly handsome, after the melodramatic fashion
of his race) and an old fellow! the centenarian of the town,
decrepit beyond belief, sang an interminable love-song to the
accompaniment of a guitar and an accordion.

These Spanish-Mexicans, decayed, picturesque, vicious, and
romantic, never failed to interest Presley. A few of them still
remained in Guadalajara, drifting from the saloon to the
restaurant, and from the restaurant to the Plaza, relics of a
former generation, standing for a different order of things,
absolutely idle, living God knew how, happy with their cigarette,
their guitar, their glass of mescal, and their siesta. The
centenarian remembered Fremont and Governor Alvarado, and the
bandit Jesus Tejeda, and the days when Los Muertos was a Spanish
grant, a veritable principality, leagues in extent, and when
there was never a fence from Visalia to Fresno. Upon this
occasion, Presley offered the old man a drink of mescal, and
excited him to talk of the things he remembered. Their talk was
in Spanish, a language with which Presley was familiar.