oked their little cigars. The
tin-man, once more penniless, with an aching head, but with a light
heart, returns to his little hammer, and a piece of solder and tin got
on the pledge of his future earnings. Such is the condition of native
Mexican mechanics, and of the mechanic arts at the capital.

[Illustration: TRAVELING IN MEXICO.]

The complicated machinery by which our shoes are made, or the equally
complicated machinery by which tin is worked up into culinary vessels,
never entered into the dreams of a Mexican mechanic. No Mexican man of
science ever thought of degrading himself so low as to undertake the
improvement of the mechanic arts; yet it is astonishing to see what
Mexican mechanics do accomplish with their imperfect means. I have
often stopped to witness the success of a poor old man building a
piano, which was both skillfully arranged and well-toned, and yet the
tools employed were apparently inadequate for such a purpose. In the
same primitive style were coaches built before foreigners came and
substituted coaches of modern pattern instead of the old, egg-formed
coach-bodies of the vice-kingdom.

It may seem like trifling to be dwelling thus upon the character of the
substratum of Mexican society, but it is from this very substratum that
the wealth or poverty of a nation is to be traced. The sense of the
dignity of labor is the foundation of American prosperity, while the
degradation of the mechanics and laboring class of Mexicans is the
cause of the national imbecility.

THE STORY OF THE PORTRESS.

Let us look at the common people of Mexico from another point of view.
I will reproduce in substance the tale of the old Meztizo woman, who
opens and shuts the great street door to all well-known inmates, by day
and by night, and to such others as can give satisfactory answers. She
is esteemed a lucky woman because she has the use of a small room on
the ground floor for her services, where she and a number of her
relatives are often hived together. Her story is very likely not true
in every particular, for it can not be denied that she, like all of her
class, does not consider falsehood _per se_ as any other than a venial
sin. How should she, considering the teaching she receives?[56] But the
story is nevertheless, in the main, a pretty fair picture of the life
of the humbler classes in republican Mexico.

She will tell you how her husband basely left her with a family of
children, and took to anothe