TRAMPING THE BYWAYS
Heavy weather still hung over the land to the southward. Indian corn,
dry and shriveled, was sometimes shocked as in the States. The first
field of maguey appeared, planted in long rows, barely a foot high, but
due in a year or two to produce pulque, the Mexican scourge, because of
its cheapness, stupefying the poorer classes. When fresh, it is said to
be beneficial in kidney troubles and other ailments, but soon becomes
over-fermented in the pulquerías of the cities and more harmful than a
stronger liquor.
Within the car was an American of fifty, thin and drawn, with huddled
shoulders, who had been beaten by rebel forces in Zacatecas and robbed
of his worldly wealth of $13,000 hidden in vain in his socks. Numbers of
United States box-cars jolted across the country end to end with
Mexican; the "B. & O." behind the "Norte de Méjico," the "N. Y. C.,"
followed by the "Central Mejicano." Long broad stretches of plain, with
cactus and mesquite, spread to low mountains blue with cold morning
mist, all but their base hung with fog. Beyond Jesús María, which is a
sample of the station names, peons lived in bedraggled tents along the
way, and the corn was even drier. The world seemed threatening to dry up
entirely. At Cartagena there began veritable forests of cactus trees,
and a wild scrub resembling the olive. Thousands of _tunas_, the
red fruit of the cactus, dotted the ground along the way. The sun
sizzled its way through the heavy sky as we climbed the flank of a rocky
range, the vast half-forested plain to the east sinking lower and lower
as we rose. Then came broken country with many muddy streams. It was
the altitude perhaps that caused the patent feeling of exhilaration, as
much as the near prospect of taking again to the open road.
As the "garrotero" ("twister," or "choker" as the brakeman is called in
Mexico) announced Dolores Hidalgo, I slipped four cartridges into my
automatic. The roadways of Mexico offered unknown possibilities. A
six-foot street-car drawn--when at all--by mules, stood at the station,
but I struck off across the rolling country by a footpath that probably
led to the invisible town. A half-mile lay behind me before I met the
first man. He was riding an ass, but when I gave him "Buenos días," he
replied with a whining: "Una limosnita! A little alms, for the love of
God." He wore a rosary about his neck and a huge cross on his
chest. When I ignored his plea he rode on mumbling. The savage bellow of
a bull not far off suggested a new possible danger on the road in this
unfenced and almost treeless country. More men passed on asses, mules,
and horses, but none afoot. Finally over the brown rise appeared Dolores
Hidalgo; two enormous churches and an otherwise small town in a
tree-touched valley. The central plaza, with many trees and hedges
trimmed in the form of animals, had in its center the statue of the
priest Hidalgo y Costilla, the "father of Mexican independence." A block
away, packed with pictures and wreathes and with much of the old
furniture as he left it, was the house in which he had lived before he
started the activities that ended in the loss of his head.
Well fortified at the excellent hotel, I struck out past the patriot
priest's house over an arched bridge into the open country. As in any
unknown land, the beginning of tramping was not without a certain mild
misgiving. The "road" was only a trail and soon lost itself. A boy
speaking good Spanish walked a long mile to set me right, and valued his
services at a _centavo_. A half-cent seemed to be the fixed fee for
anything among these country people. A peon carrying a load of
deep-green alfalfa demanded as much for the privilege of photographing
him when he was "not dressed up." He showed no sign whatever of
gratitude when I doubled it and added a cigarette.
The bright sun had now turned the day to early June. The so-called road
was a well-trodden sandy path between high cactus hedges over rolling
country. An hour out, the last look back on Dolores Hidalgo showed also
mile upon mile of rolling plain to far, far blue sierras, all in all
perhaps a hundred square miles visible. There were many travelers,
chiefly on foot and carrying bundles on their heads. The greeting of
these was "Adiós," while the better-to-do class on horse or mule back
used the customary "Buenas tardes!" Thirst grew, but though the country
was broken, with many wash-outs cutting deep across the trail, the
streams were all muddy. Now and then a tuna on the cactus hedges was
red ripe enough to be worth picking and, though full of seeds, was at
least wet. It was harder to handle than a porcupine, and commonly left
the fingers full of spines. Two men passed, offering _dulces_, a
species of native candy, for sale. I declined. "Muy bien, give us a
cigarette." I declined again, being low in stock. "Very well, adiós,
señor," they replied in the apathetic way of their race, as if it were
quite as satisfactory to them to get nothing as what they asked.
The Rancho del Capulin, where night overtook me, was a hamlet of eight
or ten houses, some mere stacks of thatch, out of the smoky doorway of
which, three feet high, peered the half-naked inmates; others of adobe,
large bricks of mud and chopped straw, which could be picked to pieces
with the fingers.
From one of the kennels a woman called out to know if I would eat. I
asked if she could give lodging also and she referred me to her husband
inside. I stopped to peer in through the doorway and he answered there
was not room enough as it was, which was evident to the slowest-witted,
for the family of six or eight of all ages, more or less dressed, lying
and squatted about the earth floor dipping their fingers into bowls of
steaming food, left not a square foot unoccupied. He advised me to go
"beg license" of the "señora" of the house farther on, a low adobe
building with wooden doors.
"There is nothing but the place opposite," she answered.
This was a sort of mud cave, man-made and door-less, the uneven earth
floor covered with excrement, human and otherwise. I returned to peer
into the mat-roofed yard with piles of corn-stalks and un-threshed
beans, and met the man of the house just arriving with his labor-worn
burros. He was a sinewy peasant of about fifty, dressed like all country
peons in shirt and tight trousers of thinnest white cotton, showing his
brown skin here and there. As he hesitated to give me answer, the wife
made frantic signs to him from behind the door, of which the cracks were
inches wide. He caught the hint and replied to my request for lodging:
"Only if you pay me three centavos."
Such exorbitance! The regulation price was perhaps one. But I yielded,
for it was raining, and entered, to sit down on a heap of unthreshed
beans. The woman brought me a mat three feet long, evidently destined
to be my bed. I was really in the family barnyard, with no end walls,
chickens overhead and the burros beyond. The rain took to dripping
through the mat roof, and as I turned back toward the first hut for the
promised frijoles and tortillas the woman called to me to say she also
could furnish me supper.
The main room of the house was about ten by ten, with mud walls five
feet high, a pitched roof of some sort of grass with several holes in
it. In the center of the room was a fireplace three feet high and four
square, with several steaming glazed pots over a fire of _encinal_
fagots. The walls were black with soot of the smoke that partly wandered
out of an irregular hole in the farther end of the room. The
eight-year-old son of the family was eating corn-stalks with great
gusto, tearing off the rind with his teeth and chewing the stalk as
others do sugar-cane. I handed him a loaf of potosino bread and he
answered a perfunctory "Gracias," but neither he nor any of the family
showed any evidence of gratitude as he wolfed it. The man complained
that all the corn had dried up for lack of rain. The woman set before me
a bowl of "sopita," with tortillas, white cheese, and boiled whole
peppers. A penniless peon traveler begged a cigarette and half my
morning loaf, and went out into the night and rain to sleep in the
"chapel," as the mud cave across the way was called. There several
travelers had settled down for the night. A girl of seventeen or so
splashed across from it to beg "a jar of water for a poor prostitute,"
apparently announcing her calling merely as a curious bit of
information.
The family took at last to eating and kept it up a full hour, meanwhile
discussing me thoroughly. Like most untutored races, they fancied I
could not understand their ordinary tones. When they wished to address
me they merely spoke louder. It is remarkable how Spain has imposed her
language on even these wild, illiterate Indians as England has not even
upon her colonies. As the rain continued to pour, I was to sleep in the
kitchen. Drunken peons were shouting outside and the family seemed much
frightened, keeping absolute silence. The four by two door with its
six-inch cracks was blocked with a heavy pole, the family retired to the
other room, and I stretched out in the darkness on the unsteady wooden
bench, a foot wide, my head on my knapsack. I was soon glad of having a
sweater, but that failed to cover my legs, and I slept virtually not at
all through a night at least four months long, punctuated by much
howling of dogs.
It was still pitch dark when the "senora" entered, to spend a long time
getting a fire started with wet fagots. Then she began making
_atole_. Taking shelled corn from an earthen jar, she sprinkled it
in the hallow of a stone and crushed it with much labor. This was put
into water, strained through a sieve, then thrown into a kettle of
boiling water. It was much toil for little food. Already she had labored
a full hour. I asked for coffee, and she answered she had none but would
buy some when the "store" opened. It grew broad daylight before this
happened and I accepted atole. It was hot, but as tasteless as might be
the water from boiled corn-stalks. There had been much discussion,
supposedly unknown to me, the night before as to how much they dared
charge me. The bill was finally set at twelve centavos (six cents),
eight for supper, three for lodging, and one for breakfast. It was
evidently highly exorbitant, for the family expressed to each other
their astonishment that I paid it without protest.
At the very outset there was a knee-deep river to cross, then miles of a
"gumbo" mud that stuck like bad habits. My feet at times weighed twenty
pounds each. Wild rocky hillsides alternated with breathless
climbs. Many cattle were scattered far and wide over the mountains, but
there was no cultivation. I passed an occasional _rancho_,
villages of six or seven adobe or thatch huts, with sometimes a ruined
brick chapel. Flowers bloomed thickly, morning glories, geraniums,
masses of a dark purple blossom. The "road" was either a mud-hole or a
sharp path of jagged rolling stones in a barren, rocky, tumbled
country. Eleven found me entering another rancho in a wild valley. My
attempts to buy food were several times answered with, "Más arribita"--
"A little higher up." I came at last to the "restaurant." It was a
cobble-stone hut hung on a sharp hillside, with a hole two feet square
opening on the road. Two men in gay sarapes, with guns and belts of huge
cartridges, reached it at the same time, and we squatted together on the
ground at an angle of the wall below the window and ate with much
exchange of banter the food poked out to us. The two had come that
morning from Guanajuato, whither I was bound, and were headed for
Dolores. It was the first time I had any certain information as to the
distance before me, which had been variously reported at from five to
forty leagues. We ate two bowls of frijoles each, and many tortillas and
chiles. One of the men paid the entire bill of twenty-seven centavos,
but accepted ten from me under protest.
Beyond was a great climb along a stony, small stream up into a blackish,
rocky range. The sun shone splendidly, also hotly. Apparently there was
no danger to travelers even in these wild parts. The peons I met were
astonishingly incurious, barely appearing to notice my existence. Some
addressed me as "jefe" (chief), suggesting the existence of mines in the
vicinity. If I drew them into conversation they answered merely in
monosyllables: "Sí, señor." "No, jefe." Not a word of Indian dialect
had I heard since entering the country. Two hours above the restaurant a
vast prospect of winding, tumbled, rocky valley and mountain piled upon
mountain beyond opened out. From the summit, surely nine thousand feet
up, began the rocky descent to the town of Santa Rosa, broken by short
climbs and troublesome with rocks. I overtook many donkeys loaded with
crates of cactus fruit, railroad ties, and the like, and finally at
three came out in sight of the famous mining city of Guanajuato.
It would take the pen of a master to paint the blue labyrinth of
mountains heaped up on all sides and beyond the long, winding city in
the narrow gorge far below, up out of which came with each puff of wind
the muffled sound of stamp-mills and smelters. As I sat, the howling of
three drunken peons drifted up from the road below. When they reached
me, one of them, past forty, thrust his unwashed, pulque-perfumed face
into mine and demanded a cigarette. When I declined, he continued to beg
in a threatening manner. Meanwhile the drunkest of the three, a youth of
perhaps seventeen, large and muscular, an evil gleam in his eye, edged
his way up to me with one arm behind him and added his demands to that
of the other. I suddenly pulled the hidden hand into sight and found in
it a sharp broken piece of rock weighing some ten pounds. Having
knocked this out of his grasp, I laid my automatic across my knees and
the more sober pair dragged the belligerent youth on up the mountain
trail.
For an hour the way wound down by steep, horribly cobbled descents, then
between mud and stone huts, and finally down a more level and wider
cobbled street along which were the rails of a mule tramway. The narrow
city wound for miles along the bottom of a deep gully, gay everywhere
with perennial flowers. The main avenue ran like a stream along the
bottom, and he who lost himself in the stair-like side streets had only
to follow downward to find it again as surely as a tributary its main
river. Masses of rocky mountains were piled up on all sides.
The climate of Guanajuato is unsurpassed. Brilliant sunshine flooded
days like our early June, in which one must hurry to sweat in the noon
time, while two blankets made comfortable covering at night. This is
true of not only one season but the year around, during which the
thermometer does not vary ten degrees. July is coldest and a fireplace
not uncomfortable in the evening. An American resident who went home to
one of the States bordering on Canada for his vacation sat wiping the
sweat out of his eyes there, when one of his untraveled countrymen
observed:
"You must feel very much at home in this heat after nine years in
Mexico."
Whereupon the sufferer arose in disgust, packed his bag, and sped south
to mosquitoless coolness.
The evening air is indescribable; all nature's changes of striking
beauty; and the setting sun throwing its last rays on the Bufa, the
salient points of that and the other peaks purple with light, with the
valleys in deep shadow, is a sight worth tramping far to see.
I drifted down along the gully next morning, following the main street,
which changed direction every few yards, "paved" with three-inch
cobbles, the sidewalks two feet wide, leaving one pedestrian to jump off
it each time two met. A diminutive streetcar drawn by mules with
jingling bells passed now and then. Peons swarmed here also, but there
was by no means the abject poverty of San Luis Potosi, and Americans
seemed in considerable favor, as their mines in the vicinity give the
town its livelihood. I was seeking the famous old "Alóndiga," but the
policeman I asked began looking at the names of the shops along the way
as if he fancied it some tobacco booth. I tried again by designating it
as "la cárcel." He still shook his head sadly. But when I described it
as the place where Father Hidalgo's head hung on a hook for thirteen
years, a great light broke suddenly upon him and he at once abandoned
his beat and led me several blocks, refusing to be shaken off. What I
first took for extreme courtesy, however, turned out to be merely the
quest of tips, an activity in which the police of most Mexican cities
are scarcely outdone by the waiters along Broadway.
The ancient building was outwardly plain and nearly square, more massive
than the rest of the city. High up on each of its corners under the
rusted hooks were the names of the four early opponents of Spanish rule
whose heads had once hung there. Inside the corridor stood the statue of
the peon who is said to have reached and fired the building under cover
of the huge slab of stone on his back. When I had waited a while in the
anteroom, the _jefe político_, the supreme commander of the city
appointed by the governor of the State, appeared, the entire roomful of
officials and visitors dropping their cigarettes and rising to greet him
with bared heads. He gave me permission to enter, and the
_presidente_, a podgy second jailor, took me in charge as the iron
door opened to let me in. The walls once red with the blood of Spaniards
slaughtered by the forces of the priest of Dolores had lost that tint in
the century since passed, and were smeared with nothing more startling
than a certain lack of cleanliness. The immense, three-story, stone
building of colonial days enclosed a vast patio in which prisoners
seemed to enjoy complete freedom, lying about the yard in the brilliant
sunshine, playing cards, or washing themselves and their scanty clothing
in the huge stone fountain in the center. The so-called cells in which
they were shut up in groups during the night were large chambers that
once housed the colonial government. By day many of them work at weaving
hats, baskets, brushes, and the like, to sell for their own benefit,
thus being able to order food from outside and avoid the mess brought in
barrels at two and seven of each afternoon for those dependent on
government rations. Now and then a wife or feminine friend of one of
the prisoners appeared at the grating with a basket of food. Several of
the inmates were called one by one to the crack of an iron door in the
wall to hear the sentence the judge had chosen to impose upon them in
the quiet of his own home; for public jury trial is not customary in
Spanish America.
In the fine gallery around the patio, in the second-story, we were
joined by an American from Colorado, charged with killing a Mexican, but
who seemed little worried with his present condition or doubtful of his
ultimate release. From the flat roof, large enough for a school
playground, there spread out a splendid view of all the city and its
surrounding mountains. There were, all told, some five hundred
prisoners. A room opening on the patio served as a school for convicts,
where a man well advanced in years, bewhiskered and of a decidedly
pedagogical cast of countenance in spite of his part Indian blood, sat
on his back, peering dreamily through his glasses at the seventy or more
pupils, chiefly between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who drowsed
before him.
There is a no less fine view from the hill behind, on which sits the
Panteon, or city cemetery. It is a rectangular place enclosing perhaps
three acres, and, as all Guanajuato has been buried here for centuries,
considerably crowded. For this reason and from inherited Spanish custom,
bodies are seldom buried, but are pigeonholed away in the deep niches
two feet square into what from the outside looks to be merely the
enclosing wall. Here, in more exact order than prevails in life, the
dead of Guanajuato are filed in series, each designated by a
number. Series six was new and not yet half occupied. A funeral ends by
thrusting the coffin into its appointed pigeonhole, which the Indian
employees brick up and face with cement, in which while still soft the
name of the defunct and other information is commonly rudely scratched
with a stick, often with amateur spelling. Here and there is one in
English:--"My Father's Servant--H. B." Some have marble headpieces with
engraved names, and perhaps a third of the niches bear the information
"En Perpetuidad," indicating that the rent has been paid up until
judgment day. The majority of the corpses, however, are dragged out
after one to five years and dumped in the common bone-yard, as in all
Spanish-speaking countries. The Indian attendants were even then opening
several in an older series and tossing skulls and bones about amid
facetious banter. The lower four rows can be reached readily, but not a
few suffer the pain of being "skied," where only those who chance to
glance upward will notice them.
There were some graves in the ground, evidently of the poorer Indian
classes. Several had been newly dug, unearthing former occupants, and a
grinning skull sat awry on a heap of earth amid a few thigh bones and
scattered ribs, all trodden under sandaled foot-prints. In one hole lay
the thick black hair of what had once been a peon, as intact as any
actor's wig. There is some property in the soil of Guanajuato's Panteón
that preserves bodies buried in the ground without coffins, so that its
"mummies" have become famous. The director attended me in person and,
crossing the enclosure, opened a door in the ground near the fourth
series of niches, where we descended a little circular iron
stairway. This opened on a high vaulted corridor, six feet wide and
thirty long. Along this, behind glass doors, stood some hundred more or
less complete bodies shrouded in sheets. They retained, or had been
arranged, in the same form they had presented in life--peon carriers
bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market women in the act of
haggling, _arrieros_ plodding behind their imaginary burros. Some
had their mouths wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had
died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning against a support,
like a man joking with an elbow on the bar, a glass between his fingers,
in the act of laughing uproariously. Several babies had been placed
upright here and there between the elders. Most of the corpses wore old
dilapidated shoes. In the farther end of the corridor were stacked
thighbones and skulls surely sufficient to fill two box-cars, all facing
to the front. I asked how many deaths the collection represented, and
the director shrugged his shoulders with an indifferent "Quién sabe?" He
who would understand the Mexican, descendant of the Aztecs, must not
overlook a certain apathetic indifference to death, and a playful manner
with its remains.
Once on earth again, I gave the director a handful of coppers and
descended to the town, motley now with market-day. The place swarmed
with color; ragged, unwashed males and females squatted on the narrow
sidewalks with fruit, sweets, gay blankets and clothing, cast-off shoes
and garments, piles of new sandals, spread out in the street before
them. Amid the babel of street cries the most persistent was
"Agua-miel!"--"Honey water," as the juice of the maguey is called during
the twelve hours before fermentation sets in. From twelve to thirty-six
hours after its drawing it is intoxicating; from then on, only fit to be
thrown away. But the sour stench from each pulquería and many a passing
peon proved a forced longevity. Several lay drunk in the streets, but
passers-by stepped over or around them with the air of those who do as
they hope to be done by. Laughter was rare, the great majority being
exceedingly somber in manner. Even their songs are gloomy wails,
recalling the Arabs. A few children played at "bull-fight," and here and
there two or three, thanks to the American influence, were engaged in
what they fancied was baseball. But for the most part they were not
playful. The young of both Indians and donkeys are trained early for the
life before them. The shaggy little ass-colts follow their mothers over
the cobbled streets and along mountain trails from birth, and the peon
children, wearing the same huge hat, gay sarape, and tight breeches as
their fathers, or the identical garb of the mothers, carry their share
of the family burden almost from infancy. Everything of whatever size or
shape was carried on the backs or heads of Indians with a supporting
strap across the forehead. A peon passed bearing on his head the corpse
of a baby in an open wooden coffin, scattered with flowers. Trunks of
full size are transported in this way to all parts of the mountain town,
and the Indian who carries the heaviest of them to a mine ten miles away
and two thousand feet above the city over the rockiest trails considers
himself well paid at thirty cents. Six peons dog-trotted by from the
municipal slaughter-house with a steer on their backs: four carried a
quarter each; one the head and skin; and the last, heart, stomach, and
intestines. Horseshoers worked in the open streets, using whatever shoes
they had on hand without adjustment, paring down the hoofs of the animal
to fit them. Here and there a policeman on his beat was languidly
occupied in making brushes, like the prisoners of the Alóndiga, and two
I saw whiling away the time making lace! Several of them tagged my
footsteps, eager for some errand. One feels no great sense of security
in a country whose boyish, uneducated, and ragged guardians of order
cringe around like beggar boys hoping for a copper.
Saturday is beggar's day, when those who seek alms more or less
surreptitiously during the week are permitted to pass in procession
along the shops, many of which disburse on this day a fixed sum, as high
as twenty dollars, in copper centavos. Now and then the mule-cars bowled
over a laden ass, which sat up calmly on its haunches, front feet in the
air, until the obstruction passed. All those of Indian blood were
notable for their strong white teeth, not one of which they seem ever to
lose. In the church a bit higher up several bedraggled women and
pulque-besotted peons knelt before a disgusting representation of the
Crucifixion. The figure had real hair, beard, eyebrows, and even
eyelashes, with several mortal wounds, barked knees and shins, half the
body smeared with red paint as blood, all in all fit only for the
morgue. Farther on, drowsed the post-office, noted like all south of the
Rio Grande for its unreliability. Unregistered packages seldom arrive at
their destination, groceries sent from the States to American residents
are at least half eaten en route. A man of the North unacquainted with
the ways of Mexico sent unregistered a Christmas present of a dozen
pairs of silk socks. The addressee inquired for them daily for
weeks. Finally he wrote for a detailed description of the hectic lost
property, and had no difficulty in recognizing at least two pairs as the
beak-nosed officials hitched up their trousers to tell him again nothing
whatever had come for him. Not long before my arrival a Mexican
mail-car had been wrecked, and between the ceiling and the outer wall
were found over forty thousand letters postal clerks had opened and
thrown there.
I drifted into an "Escuela Gratuita para Niños." The heavy, barn-like
door gave entrance to a cobbled corridor, opening on a long schoolroom
with two rows of hard wooden benches on which were seated a half hundred
little peons aged seven to ten, all raggedly dressed in the identical
garb, sandals and all, of their fathers in the streets, their huge straw
hats covering one of the walls. The _maestro_, a small,
down-trodden-looking Mexican, rushed to the door to bring me down to the
front and provide me with a chair. The school had been founded some six
months before by a woman of wealth, and offered free instruction to the
sons of peons. But the Indians as always were suspicious, and for the
most part refused to allow their children to be taught the "witchcraft"
of the white man. The teacher asked what class I cared to hear and then
himself hastily suggested "cuentitas." The boys were quick at figures,
at least in the examples the maestro chose to give them, but he declined
to show them off in writing or spelling. Several read aloud, in that
mumbled and half-pronounced manner common to Mexico, the only
requirement appearing to be speed. Then came a class in "Historia
Santa," that is, various of the larger boys arose to spout at full
gallop and the distinct enunciation of an "El" train, the biblical
account of the creation of the world, the legends of Adam and Eve, Cain
and Abel, and Noah's travels with a menagerie, all learned by rote. The
entire school then arose and bowed me out.
A visit to a mixed school, presided over by carelessly dressed maidens
of uncertain age and the all-knowing glance of those who feel the world
and all its knowledge lies concentrated in the hollow of their hands,
showed a quite similar method of instruction. On the wall hung a great
lithograph depicting in all its dreadful details the alleged horrors of
"alcoolismo." Even the teachers rattled off their questions with an
atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, and he must have been a
Spanish scholar indeed who could have caught more than the gist of the
recited answers. This indistinctness of enunciation and the Catholic
system of learning by rote instead of permitting the development of
individual power to think were as marked even in the _colegio_,
corresponding roughly to our high schools. Even there the professor
never commanded, "More distinctly!" but he frequently cried, "Faster!"
On the wall of this higher institution was a stern set of rules, among
which some of the most important were:
"Students must not smoke in the presence of professors," though this was
but mildly observed, for when I entered the study room with the director
and his assistant, all of us smoking, the boys, averaging fifteen years
of age, merely held their lighted cigarettes half out of sight behind
them until we passed. Another rule read: "Any student frequenting a
tavern, café chantant, or house of ill-fame may be expelled." He might
run that risk in most schools, but none but the Latinized races would
announce the fact in plain words on the bulletin-boards. The director
complained that the recent revolutions had set the school far back, as
each government left it to the next to provide for such secondary
necessities.