Land without chimneys; or, the byways of Mexico

by Alfred Oscar Coffin

This is very hard on a bar of soap, but the linen is returned to you as white as snow.

There are many Americans in Monterey, and they are trying very hard to implant their American customs upon the country, one of which is the color line in public places.

All the streets are paved with smooth, round cobble stones from the mountain gorges. They are about the size and shape of a butter-dish, and they make just about as smooth a pavement as so many acres of cannon balls would make, buried half way in cement, and meeting about as closely as round objects usually meet.

I can think of no American equivalent, except a corduroy log bridge, or driving across the railroad tracks in a switch-yard.

The gutter is always in the middle of the street, which is a foot or more lower than the rest. An American has gained a concession to lay one street with Texas vitrified brick, and let us hope it is a fore-runner of others. But, come to think of it, it might work a hardship to a time-honored custom; an innovation to some might prove an iconoclast to the church.

It has long been a custom during Passion week and other fiestas, for the priests to prescribe a penance for those who confessed to a sin in thought or word or deed either in the past, present or future tense; and one of the favorite punishments is to require a number of maidens to walk down a street leading to a church, and return, crawling upon their bare knees to the church to be absolved. As they would leave a trail of blood over the cruel stones, some agonized lover would east his zerape before his beloved and beseech her to let him lead it in front of her to the church and spare the laceration; but poor ignorant creatures, they have been taught that this is the only way to have their sins forgiven.

I notice I never see men in these pilgrimages, and it must prove that the men have more hard sense than the women, or else the priests have their own reasons for appointing women only.

Now what would a penance amount to on a San Antonio brick pavement? Just a picnic, no more. It takes a regulation Monterey pavement to draw blood in the first round. I like the Texas innovation, but I shall vote to keep one of these threshing-machine streets for the church and auld lang syne.

In Monterey are a number of smelting works, where the lead and silver ore is reduced to pigs, and here we see the applied difference in wages.

The hardest work in the smelter is to weigh in and deliver to the furnace a thousand pounds of ore every fifteen minutes, and this is not unskilled labor either. The man has a two-wheeled cart into which he must weigh in 600 pounds of ore, and 400 pounds of coke and flux material. Those ores are perhaps fifty yards away at the dump, and if the ore is very refractory, he must mix four or five grades in different proportions. His cart must be always on scales as he goes from one pile to the other, and he must make four trips an hour, and for this he cannot possibly make over a dollar a day, and the regulation wages for even the hardest work is 67½ cents for a maximum, if he is able to make eight full hours.