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Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras — Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond by Harry Alverson Franck
page 78 of 220 (35%)
score, joins the forty thousand vendors of forty thousand different
species of uselessness howling in at least as many different voices and
tones, each a bit louder than all the others, until even an unoccupied
wanderer concludes that sleep is an idle waste of an all too short
existence.

I brought up a day of random wandering in state's prison. The
_Penitenciaria_ of Guadalajara is a huge, wheel-shaped building in
the most modern style of that class of architecture. The bullet-headed
youth in soldier's uniform and the complexion of a long-undusted carpet,
leaning on his musket at the entrance, made no move to halt me, and I
stepped forth on a patio forested with orange trees, to find that most
of the public had preceded me, including some hundred fruit, tortilla,
cigarette, and candy vendors. Here was no sign of prisoners. I
approached another stern boy armed like a first-class cruiser in war
time and he motioned upward with his gun barrel. The dwelling of the
_comandante_ faced the patio on the second-story corridor. His son,
aged five, met me with the information:

"Papa 'sta dormido."

But he was misinformed, for when his mother introduced me into the
parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, was already rubbing the sleep out of
his eyes and preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. When
my impressiveness had penetrated his reawakening intellect, he prepared
me a document which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the
statement that the prison and all it contained was mine for the asking.

A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three immense iron doors
through anterooms in charge of trusties, in prison garb of the material
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