The women in Mexico are gaining more freedom gradually; they have them now as telegraph and telephone operators. Some Mexican bachelors use the telephone for an alarm clock, that is, they have the girls wake them by means of the telephone placed in their room.
No bills are legal unless they are stamped. Every man has a peculiar mark which he scratches beneath his name. It is a sort of a trade mark, and makes his name legal.
The Indian women have some means of coloring cotton so that it will never fade.
There are public letter writers on the plazas, where one can have the correspondence attended to for a small sum.
Letter-writing is an expensive thing in Mexico; to all points not exceeding sixteen leagues, they pay ten cents for a quarter of an ounce, or fifty cents an ounce. Postal cards are two cents; to send a letter to the United States only costs five cents. Every state in Mexico has its own stamps.
Some haciendas are enormously large in Mexico. One man owns a farm through which the railroad runs for thirty miles. It is said to comprise ten thousand square miles.
The public schools in Mexico are similar to those in the States fifty years ago; the schools are never mixed; the boys attend one place and the girls another; the advanced teachers are elected, and are given a house to hold the school in, and one hundred dollars a month for conducting it. For the others they get a house somewhere, and from thirty to sixty dollars; ten years ago girls were not taught spelling or writing in public schools; they are now taught all the common branches and English, which has replaced French; sketching, music, fancy-work, and plain sewing; the hours are from 8 to 12.30, and from 2 to 6; they are thoroughly taught the geography of their own country, but they absolutely learn nothing of other lands.