This was a sort of mud cave, man-made and door-less, the uneven earth
floor covered with excrement, human and otherwise. I returned to peer
into the mat-roofed yard with piles of corn-stalks and un-threshed
beans, and met the man of the house just arriving with his labor-worn
burros. He was a sinewy peasant of about fifty, dressed like all country
peons in shirt and tight trousers of thinnest white cotton, showing his
brown skin here and there. As he hesitated to give me answer, the wife
made frantic signs to him from behind the door, of which the cracks were
inches wide. He caught the hint and replied to my request for lodging:

"Only if you pay me three centavos."

Such exorbitance! The regulation price was perhaps one. But I yielded,
for it was raining, and entered, to sit down on a heap of unthreshed
beans. The woman brought me a mat three feet long, evidently destined
to be my bed. I was really in the family barnyard, with no end walls,
chickens overhead and the burros beyond. The rain took to dripping
through the mat roof, and as I turned back toward the first hut for the
promised frijoles and tortillas the woman called to me to say she also
could furnish me supper.

The main room of the house was about ten by ten, with mud walls five
feet high, a pitched roof of some sort of grass with several holes in
it. In the center of the room was a fireplace three feet high and four
square, with several steaming glazed pots over a fire of _encinal_
fagots. The walls were black with soot of the smoke that partly wandered
out of an irregular hole in the farther end of the room. The
eight-year-old son of the family was eating corn-stalks with great
gusto, tearing off the rind with his teeth and chewing the stalk as
others do sugar-cane. I handed him a loaf of potosino bread and he