Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/130

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124
THE INMATES OF THE HOSPICIO.

house-servant, husband or wife. It is superintended by the Sisters of Charity, of whom there are some twenty in the establishment, and managed with an amount of economy and skill wonderful to witness. In its sixteen different departments it is at once, a foundling hospital, reform school, juvenile school, orphan asylum, asylum for the aged and indigent, boy's and girl's high school, school of arts, workshop, college and hospital.

In one department we saw thirty foundlings, two of which had just been brought in, all white, and most of them presenting an effeminate delicacy of feature, indicating "blue blood." The Indians, and people of part Indian blood, do not throw their children into the streets, to be eaten by dogs and hogs, whether born in or out of lawful wedlock. They are neatly dressed, nursed by Indian women, and well cared for. In another ward were one hundred and five boys, arrested by the police, as vagabonds on the streets, and sent here to be reformed. They were drilling as soldiers when we came in. The City pays six and one quarter cents each, per day, for the support of these boys, and they all have to learn useful trades before leaving the institution. I noticed among the children many who had lost one or both eyes, and was told that in the Indian villages it is not uncommon for the parents to thus mutilate their children in infancy, to fit them for begging, or to enable them to avoid military duty.

In another ward we saw the old women, some of them from eighty to one hundred years of age, and girls of weak intellect, sitting in the sun and doing some little plain sewing or knitting, and in an adjoining room a number of blind girls busily engaged in grinding half-hulled corn, with the metate into tortillas, a sweet