with aprons spread out and on them little piles of six nuts each, sold
at a centavo. There were peanuts, narrow strips of cocoanut, plantains,
bananas short and fat, sickly little apples, dwarf peaches, small wild
grapes, oranges green in color, potatoes often no larger than marbles,
as if the possessor could not wait until they grew up before digging
them; cactus leaves, the spines shaved off, cut up into tiny squares to
serve as food; bundles of larger cactus spines brought in by hobbling
old women or on dismal asses and sold as fuel, _aguacates_, known
to us as "alligator pears" and tasting to the uninitiated like
axle-grease; pomegranates, pecans, cheeses flat and white, every species
of basket and earthen jar from two-inch size up, turnips, some cut in
two for those who could not afford a whole one; onions, flat slabs of
brown, muddy-looking soap, rice, every species of _frijole_, or
bean, shelled corn for tortillas, tomatoes--_tomate coloradito_,
though many were tiny and green as if also prematurely gathered--peppers
red and green, green-corn with most of the kernels blue, lettuce,
radishes, cucumbers, carrots, cabbages, melons of every size except
large, string-beans, six-inch cones of the muddiest of sugar, the first
rough product of the crushers wound in swamp grass and which prospective
purchasers handled over and over, testing them now and then by biting
off a small corner, though there was no apparent difference; sausages
with links of marble size, everything in the way of meat, tossed about
in the dirt, swarming with flies, handled, smelled, cut into tiny bits
for purchasers; even strips of intestines, the jaw-bone of a sheep with
barely the smell of meat on it; all had value to this gaunt community,
nothing was too green, or old, or rotten to be offered for
sale. Chickens with legs tied lay on the ground or were carried about
from day to day until purchasers of such expensive luxuries
appeared. There were many men with a little glass box full of squares of
sweets like "fudge," selling at a half-cent each; every possible odd and