Little Folks of North America / Stories about children living in the different parts of North America

by Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade

There are usually large dairies on these farms where women are busy making the rich milk into butter and cheese. Thousands of pounds are often sent to market from one such farm during the year.

You have probably seen century plants in the hot-houses you have visited, and have been told that they belong to the aloe family. When the Spaniards first came to Mexico they saw the Indians making paper from the pulp of the leaves of the aloe plant and twine from its fibers. The sharp thorns on the edges of the leaves furnished needles for the Indian women, and the sap of the aloe was made into pulque, the favorite drink of the natives. They also made hammocks from the fibers and thatched the roofs of their huts with the big leaves, lapping one over the other like shingles. In fact, the Indians made so many uses of the aloe plant that the Spaniards thought it worth while to raise it in large quantities for themselves.

The aloe has thick, pointed leaves sometimes ten feet long. It blossoms about once in ten years, when it sends a flower stalk twenty or thirty feet up into the air. At the very top an immense cluster of greenish-yellow blossoms appears. All the strength of the plant goes into these blossoms for, as they open, the leaves wither and die.

The Indians have learned to tell when the plant is getting ready to send up its giant flower-stalk. Just before it appears they cut out the heart with a sharp knife, leaving only the thick, outside rind of the stem. The sweet sap that should have gone to feed the flower-stalk begins to ooze into the hollow and continues to do so for several weeks. The Indians, who have discovered the right time to cut into the plant to prevent its flowering, have also learned that the sap can be used in making the drink which they call pulque.

The city of Mexico is a beautiful one, with high stone walls around it, a large square in the centre, and broad streets running at right angles to each other. Nearly all the houses are built of stone, with flat roofs on which the people sit in the evening to enjoy the cool breezes and watch the stars twinkling merrily in the heavens above.

The children of the big stone houses can play in inner courtyards among flowering plants and fountains. But when they leave their homes to go out into the city they must pass through heavy doors studded with nails and heavily chained. The house windows that face the street have iron bars across them, so that at first these houses seem like fortresses. But when one passes to the back part of such a building and looks out through the windows there upon the pretty courtyard with its fountains and flower-beds, or takes a comfortable chair on one of the balconies, with its gilded balustrades covered with trailing vines, he begins to feel as though he were in a beautiful palace.

The great square in the middle of the city is beautiful with trees and flowers, statues, and walks paved with snowy marble. In the long-ago a temple stood here where hundreds of people were sacrificed to the gods in whom the Aztecs believed. On one side of the square stands the house of the president, and on another there is a grand cathedral where the Mexicans and their children go to worship. The cathedral doors are always open so that any day you may go inside and find people kneeling there. Rich and poor, grand ladies in delicate muslins and jewels, and the poorest Indians with their packs of fruit or coops filled with chickens still on their backs, kneel in prayer side by side.

Many of the children who have been to the cathedral to worship, stop as they leave it before the flower-decked stands under the trees, where women are busy selling cool drinks and sweetmeats. Or perhaps they are more interested in the Indians wandering about with cages of humming-birds and parrots, and they beg their parents or older friends who are with them to buy one of the birds to carry home.

As the children go on their way they pass many a horseman riding through the streets with broad hat shading his face, and with leggings trimmed with buttons and silver braid. Silver spurs shine brightly at his side in the sunlight, as also do the gorgeous trappings of his horse.

There are all sorts of people to be seen on the streets of Mexico. There are Indians with packs of all sorts on their backs. There are girls in gaily striped skirts selling fruit. There are water-carriers in leather aprons with large earthen jars on their backs and smaller ones hanging down in front; there are bird-sellers with flower-trimmed cages; there are the Indian policemen who carry lanterns at night, which they place in the middle of the street while they nap in the doorways close by. These naps must be very short, however, because every fifteen minutes it is the business of the policemen to blow shrill whistles, and at every hour to call the time.