only water craft the great majority of them have ever seen.

A natural amphitheater encloses the ball-ground in which were gathered
the wives of Americans, in snowy white, to watch a game between teams
made up chiefly of "gringoes" of the mines, my one-time classmate still
at short-stop, as in our schoolboy days, thanks to which no doubt
Guanajuato held the baseball championship of Mexico. Like the English
officials of India, the Americans in high places here were noticeable
for their youth, and, at least here on the ball-ground, for their
democracy, known to all by their boyhood nicknames, yet held almost in
reverence by the Mexican youths that filled in the less important
positions. At the club after the game the champion Mexican player
discoursed on the certainty of ultimate American intervention and
expressed his own attitude with:

"Let it come, for I am not a politician but a baseball player."

It was election day, and I passed several doorways, among them that of
the company stable, in which a half-dozen old fossils in their most
solemn black garb crouched dreamily over wooden tables with registers,
papers, and ink bottles before them. Now and then a frightened peon
slunk up hat in hand to find whether they wished him to vote, and how,
or to see if perhaps he had not voted already--by absent treatment. The
manager of one of the mines had come into the office of the jefe
politico of his district the night before and found the ballots already
made out for the "liberal" candidate. He tore them up and sent his own
men to watch the election, with the result that there was a strong
majority in that precinct in favor of the candidate more pleasing to the
mine owners. The pulquerias and saloons of the peons had been closed,
but not the clubs and resorts of the white men. In one of these I sat