n a
company and with several instruments and voices together, sometimes
severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar
accompany, and one of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount
into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that
high-pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely
human, but altogether sad.

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all
the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans, and it was from the
same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were
selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old
family estates, not one rood of which remained to him. You would ask him
how that came about, and elicit some tangled story back-foremost, from
which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing
men, and the Mexicans greedy like children, but no other certain fact.
Their merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the
former landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled
with the sight of ready money; but they were gentle-folk besides, and
that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft.
Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on
the other party to examine the terms with any great minuteness; nay,
suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they
would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within
the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the Mexican, in spite
of the advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.
To have spoken in the matter, he said, above all to have let the other
party guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting
his word." The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been
brought up to understand all business as a competition in fraud, and
honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying out, but not
the creation, of agreements. This single unworldly trait will account
for much of that revolution of which we are speaking. The Mexicans have
the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the accusation cuts
both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely
have passed into the hands of the more scrupu