rags, hundreds of children—faces unwashed, hair unkempt—sallied around, gnawing on great chunks of meat, playing in huge basins of soup, scooping up frijoles with tortillas, or screaming and fighting with the myriads of dogs. Gambling was in full force; women were cooking in every way known from the time of Adam, selling everything, screaming their prices, and, like the tireless venders they are, seldom failing to secure a purchaser. Some presided in booths, gayly lined with fruits and flowers, and danced, sang, and patronized you, while generously overflowing with pulque. The air was filled with an indiscriminate jangle of most unearthly sounds, from a variety of very earthly instruments, which, with the dust, the odor of meat cooking and the fumes from the crowd added, made us hurry along to the chapel on the hill, where a treat was in store for us. The Indians from the fastnesses of the Sierras, in the far north were to dance in their peculiar costumes.
Animated by insatiable curiosity, and anxious to witness the entire ceremonials, I pressed through the crowd of pobres to the inner circle. What a scene! The wildest, most fantastically decked beings that mortal eye ever beheld were in the inner space. The old men, adults, and boys, with their immense panaches of variegated colors that towered to startling height; their curiously wrought dresses that were strongly marked with the national colors, somewhat resembling the kilt of the Scottish highlanders; their ornamented moccasins; the women and little girls with their curious masks of coarse gauze, in black and white, crowned with immense wreaths of feathers, of every variety, intermingled with flashing tinsels, with tawdry dresses of many colors, and in fashion not unlike the kilt of the men and boys, made a scene that was grotesque and fantastic beyond description. Then the dance! They formed circles—the men on the outer circle and the women on the first inner circle—and again other circles of the younger Indians of both sexes, forming one within the other. The everlasting jangle and trum-trum of the ghastly jarana covered with the skin of an armadillo, looking like an exhumed skeleton, with the finery of flaunting ribbons floating around it, its harsh notes min-
