The frijoles, or beans, are served on a tortilla, a sort of corn-cake baked in the shape of a buckwheat cake. Another tortilla is folded together, and answers for a spoon. After finishing the beans it is not considered proper or polite unless you eat your spoon and plate.
Every family has at least half a dozen servants. They are considered excellent when they receive five dollars a month, and board themselves. Sometimes they are paid three dollars a month, and allowed six cents a day to furnish what they want to eat. This sum is called the retainer. Women do the cooking, and the men wait on the tables, make the beds and nurse the babies. Contrary to the usual report, they are very, very cleanly. Every room in the house is swept daily; balconies and uncarpeted rooms scrubbed as often. Beds, which are always single iron cots like those used in hospitals, have board or iron bottoms, and the hardest of hard pillows.
Brooms are an unseen article, notwithstanding the country furnishes the most beautiful broom corn in the world. It is bought in bunches and tied to a short stick, and used in that manner, forcing the sweeper to bend nearly double. Scrub brushes are but a bunch of coarse straw tied around the top with a string, but they make the floors perfectly white. There is a fortune here awaiting some lively fellow who will bring machinery and make brooms and brushes for the natives: the straw costs comparatively nothing, and is of the very best quality.
Lotteries swarm here, and are a curse to the poor. Men, women, and children sell the tickets along the streets, and the poor have such a mania for buying that they will pawn their clothing in order to obtain a ticket.
There are no newsboys in this country. Occasionally a boy is seen with a package of papers, but he does not call out like they do in the States. Women generally sell papers, which they fold and hold out toward passers-by, never saying a word.
The people appear just the opposite of lazy. They move along the streets with a trot, equal in speed to the burro; they never turn their heads to gaze at a stranger, but go along intent on their own affairs as if they realized the value of time and shortness of life.
Ladies in the States should import their servants from Mexico. Their hire is a very little sum; they furnish their own food; they are the most polite, most obedient people alive, and are faithful. Their only fault—and a very common one with servants—is that they are slow, but not extremely so. To children they are most devoted; as nurses they are unexcelled; their love for children amounts to a passion, a mania. As a common thing here, a girl of thirteen is not happy unless she has a baby; but with all that they are most generous with them. Much amusement was caused the other day by an American asking a pretty little black-eyed girl if the bouncing babe tied to her back was hers. "Si, senor, and yours, too," she replied, politely.
The men share the troubles of nursing with the women, and the babies, tied on their mother's or father's back, seem as content as if they were rocked in downy cradles. Babies, as soon as born, are clad in pantaloons and loose waist, irrespective of sex. There are no three-yard skirts on them. Boys retain this garb, but girls, when able to walk, are wrapped twice around the body with a straight cloth which serves for skirts.
If you ask a native in regard to the sex of a baby he will not say it is a boy or it is a girl, but "el hombre" (a man) or "la mujer" (the woman.) All efforts fail to make them say "hijo" (son) or "hija" (daughter).