The city of Monterey is supplied with water from a famous spring in the heart of the city, which also gives birth to the Santa Lucia, which is crossed by numerous bridges, and is the public bath-house and laundry. A whole company of soldiers will march from the barracks down the principal street, and the first bridge they reach, down they go into the water, and every man will take off his shirt, wade in and begin his laundering. In all likelihood, they will find as many women already in the water enjoying a bath, and they will all sit in the sun and smoke cigarettes together while their clothes dry.
The little proprieties which most people attach to a bath do not seem to trouble these innocent people, especially when an orthodox bath-house charges a quarter of a dollar for what the city gives free gratis for nothing. If cleanliness is next to godliness, these people must be away up in the line of promotion, for from sunrise to sunset, I have seen every rod of this canal a moving panorama of black-haired swimmers, men, women and children, while the banks were white with drying laundry.
The painter who first made that picture about the mermaids sitting upon a rock and combing their raven locks, must have been standing on a
BATHING AT AGUASCALIENTES.
bridge here and got his idea from the Mexican houris trying to dry their hair before they—well, while waiting for their clothes to get dry.
The puenta Purisima is the bridge where a wing of the Mexican army withstood Gen. Taylor’s division. The legend says that the image of the Virgin hovered over the Mexican army and enabled it to do wonders, and that they re-enacted the old story of Thermopylæ. Below the old bridge is a perpetual laundry. A Mexican laundry is a study in white, and when you have mastered the details, it differs not one jot or tittle from all the other laundries in the republic.
Like Mahomet’s mountain, the Mexican laundress always carries her clothes to the water, and rests upon her knees by the brink. She casts a garment into the stream until it is wet, and then wads it upon a flat stone, and soaps it until it is a mass of foam. She then puts it in a wooden tray, such as we use in our kitchen, and rubs all the soap out of it, and immediately empties the water and repeats the process.
If she dips a piece a dozen times, she soaps it just as often, and empties the soapsuds after each rubbing, and never, never uses the soapsuds a second time.