September 12th, evening.
I sent you a rather hasty line this morning in commemoration of —'s birthday, the best and most faithful of friends for this life and the next. I went to early Mass to San Lorenzo, in the old part of the town, one of the ways of seeing Mexico City.
Indians were sweeping the Alameda as I passed through, with brooms of dry bushes tied on to long sticks. A thin, pinky-white sun was filtering through the lovely trees, and watering-carts were in evidence, making rather scant tracings on the dusty, untrodden streets of the night.
A little boy was drinking from a gutter, like some puppy—his morning meal, I suppose. I do hope he took the pennies I gave him to some place where he could fill his little "tummy." The population, Indian and Mestizo only, up and about their tasks, were shivering a little in the chilly morning. Long lines of arrieros, bringing their heavily laden donkeys into town with the day's provision for le ventre de Mexico, were prodding and exhorting their burros none too gently.
Priests introduced the donkey here in the sixteenth century, to relieve the Indian of his burdens, and the poor beasts have had an awful time ever since. The only live stock for whose comfort the Indians are really solicitous is the fighting-cock. He is fed, he is housed, and his vagaries and exigencies are tenderly followed.
Elim has just asked me, with a hopeful gleam in his young eye, what "raining cats and dogs" means, a side-light on the afternoon weather.
The government would love to defer the elections for a while, but the authorities don't dare not carry out the promised program.
To-day Arthur Willert, the very agreeable London Times correspondent, just arrived, lunched with us, and we got a view of Mexico from another angle, and a lot of outside news. Evidently they are pessimistic in Washington. He comes to tea to-morrow to meet the McLarens and Von H., to whom he also has a letter. As Von H. is busy hunting down the perpetrators of the Puebla outrage, with his own strength and time and money, he does not see anything couleur de rose, and Willert will get nothing cheerful from him.
Saturday we dined at the new British Legation, the first dinner Hohler has given there. It is really quite lovely. A dado of Puebla tiles has just been completed around the hall and stairway, and the large rooms are sparingly and very decoratively arranged with H.'s good things, pending the arrival from England of the government furnishings.
The new houses here are generally horrors; they don't even build them with patios, and it seems criminal to shut out of daily life this beauty of light and sky. Many of the new buildings are almost like miniature New York tenements, with light-shafts only for some of the rooms. My patio, with its square of heaven, is an abiding joy.