eans are bringing the newest
machinery and the most advanced arts into the country, there is
scarcely any symptom of improvement among the people, who still hold
firmly to the wisdom of their ancestors. An American author, Mayer,
quotes a story of a certain people in Italy, as an illustration of the
feeling of the Indians in Mexico respecting improvements. In this
district, he says that the peasants loaded their panniers with
vegetables on one side, and balanced the opposite pannier by filling it
with stones; and when a traveller pointed out the advantage to be
gained by loading both panniers with vegetables, he was answered that
their forefathers from time immemorial had so carried their produce to
market, that they were wise and good men, and that a stranger showed
very little understanding or decency who interfered in the established
customs of a country. I need hardly say that the Indians are utterly
ignorant; and this of course accounts to a great extent for their
obstinate conservatism.

There were several shops round the market-place at Grande, and the
brandy-drinking was going on much as at Soquital. The shops in these
small towns are general stores, like "the shop" in coal- and
iron-districts in England. It is only in large towns that the different
retail-trades are separated. One thing is very noticeable in these
country stores, the certainty of finding a great stock of sardines in
bright tin boxes. The idea of finding _Sardines a l'huile_ in Indian
villages seemed odd enough; but the fact is, that the difficulty of
getting fish up from the coast is so great that these sardines are not
much dearer than anything else, and they go a long way. Montezuma's
method of supplying his table with fresh fish from the gulf, by having
relays of Indian porters to run up with it, is too expensive for
general use, and there is no efficient substitute. It is in consequence
of this scarcity of fish, that Church-fasts have never been very
strictly kept in Mexico.

[Illustration: HIEROGLYPHICS.]

The method of keeping accounts in the shops--which, it is to be
remembered, are almost always kept by white or half-white people,
hardly ever by Indians--is primitive enough. Here is a score which I
copied, the hieroglyphics standing for dollars, half-dollars, medios or
half-reals, cuartillos or quarter-reals, and tlacos--or clacos--which
are eighths of a real, or about 3/4d. While account-keeping among
the comparatively educated tra