end of the shops was there; old women humped over their meager wares,
smoking cigarettes, offered for sale the scraps of calico left over from
the cutting of a gown, six-inch triangles of no fathomable use to
purchasers. There were entire blocks selling only long strips of leather
for the making of sandals. Many a vendor had all the earmarks of
leprosy. There were easily five thousand of them, besides another market
on the other side of the town, for this poverty-stricken city of some
fifty thousand inhabitants. The swarming stretched a half mile away in
many a radiating street, and scores whose entire stock could not be
worth fifteen cents sat all day without selling more than half of it. An
old woman stopped to pick up four grains of corn and greedily tucked
them away in the rags that covered her emaciated frame. Now and then a
better-dressed _potosino_ passed, making purchases, a peon, male or
female, slinking along behind with a basket; for it is a horrible breach
of etiquette for a ten-dollar-a-month Mexican to be publicly seen
carrying anything.

One wondered why there was not general suicide in such a community of
unmitigated misery. Why did they not spring upon me and snatch the purse
I displayed or die in the attempt? How did they resist eating up their
own wares? It seemed strange that these sunken-chested, hobbling, halt,
shuffling, shivering, starved creatures should still fight on for
life. Why did they not suddenly rise and sack the city? No wonder those
are ripe for revolution whose condition cannot be made worse.

Policemen in sandals and dark-blue shoddy cap and cloak looked little
less miserable than the peons. All about the covered market were peon
restaurants, a ragged strip of canvas as roof, under it an ancient
wooden table and two benches. Unwashed Indian women cooked in several
open earthen bowls the favorite Mexican dishes,--_frijoles_ (a stew