ultimate release. From the flat roof, large enough for a school
playground, there spread out a splendid view of all the city and its
surrounding mountains. There were, all told, some five hundred
prisoners. A room opening on the patio served as a school for convicts,
where a man well advanced in years, bewhiskered and of a decidedly
pedagogical cast of countenance in spite of his part Indian blood, sat
on his back, peering dreamily through his glasses at the seventy or more
pupils, chiefly between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who drowsed
before him.

There is a no less fine view from the hill behind, on which sits the
Panteon, or city cemetery. It is a rectangular place enclosing perhaps
three acres, and, as all Guanajuato has been buried here for centuries,
considerably crowded. For this reason and from inherited Spanish custom,
bodies are seldom buried, but are pigeonholed away in the deep niches
two feet square into what from the outside looks to be merely the
enclosing wall. Here, in more exact order than prevails in life, the
dead of Guanajuato are filed in series, each designated by a
number. Series six was new and not yet half occupied. A funeral ends by
thrusting the coffin into its appointed pigeonhole, which the Indian
employees brick up and face with cement, in which while still soft the
name of the defunct and other information is commonly rudely scratched
with a stick, often with amateur spelling. Here and there is one in
English:--"My Father's Servant--H. B." Some have marble headpieces with
engraved names, and perhaps a third of the niches bear the information
"En Perpetuidad," indicating that the rent has been paid up until
judgment day. The majority of the corpses, however, are dragged out
after one to five years and dumped in the common bone-yard, as in all
Spanish-speaking countries. The Indian attendants were even then opening
several in an older series and tossing skulls and bones about amid