facetious banter. The lower four rows can be reached readily, but not a
few suffer the pain of being "skied," where only those who chance to
glance upward will notice them.

There were some graves in the ground, evidently of the poorer Indian
classes. Several had been newly dug, unearthing former occupants, and a
grinning skull sat awry on a heap of earth amid a few thigh bones and
scattered ribs, all trodden under sandaled foot-prints. In one hole lay
the thick black hair of what had once been a peon, as intact as any
actor's wig. There is some property in the soil of Guanajuato's Panteon
that preserves bodies buried in the ground without coffins, so that its
"mummies" have become famous. The director attended me in person and,
crossing the enclosure, opened a door in the ground near the fourth
series of niches, where we descended a little circular iron
stairway. This opened on a high vaulted corridor, six feet wide and
thirty long. Along this, behind glass doors, stood some hundred more or
less complete bodies shrouded in sheets. They retained, or had been
arranged, in the same form they had presented in life--peon carriers
bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market women in the act of
haggling, _arrieros_ plodding behind their imaginary burros. Some
had their mouths wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had
died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning against a support,
like a man joking with an elbow on the bar, a glass between his fingers,
in the act of laughing uproariously. Several babies had been placed
upright here and there between the elders. Most of the corpses wore old
dilapidated shoes. In the farther end of the corridor were stacked
thighbones and skulls surely sufficient to fill two box-cars, all facing
to the front. I asked how many deaths the collection represented, and
the director shrugged his shoulders with an indifferent "Quien sabe?" He
who would understand the Mexican, descendant of the Aztecs, must not