along them a few inches an hour. Take the most perfect day of late May
or early June in our North, brush off the clouds, make the air many
times fresher and clearer, add October nights, and multiply the sum
total by 365, and it is more easily understood why Americans who settle
in the Guanajuato region so frequently remain there.

The room I shared with a mine boss was of chilly stone walls and floor,
large and square, with a rug, two beds, and the bare necessities. The
mine mess, run by a Chinaman, furnished meals much like those of a
25-cent restaurant in Texas, at the rate of $5 a week. No Mexican was
permitted to eat with the Americans, not even with the "rough-necks."
When the whistle blew at seven next morning, some forty peons, who had
straggled one by one in the dawn to huddle up together in their red
sarapes among the rocks of the drab hillside, marched past the
timekeeper, turning over their blankets at a check counter, and with
their lunches, of the size of the round tortilla at the bottom and four
to six inches high, in their handkerchiefs, climbed into the six-foot,
iron ore-bucket until it was completely roofed with their immense straw
hats. Near by those of the second night-shift, homeward bound, halted,
to stand one by one on a wooden block with outstretched arms to be
carefully searched for stolen ore by a tried and trusted fellow-peon. A
pocketful of "high-grade" might be worth several dollars. The American
"jefe" sat in the hoisthouse, writing out requisitions for candles,
dynamite, and kindred supplies for the "jefecitos," or straw bosses, of
the hundred or more peons still lined up before the shaft. With the last
batch of these in the bucket, we white men stepped upon the platform
below it and dropped suddenly into the black depths of the earth, with
now and then a stone easily capable of cracking a skull bounding swiftly
with a hollow sound past us back and forth across the shaft.