to ask for money within twenty-four hours. He came the same evening, and brought a wonderful story about his passport not being en règle, and that unless we could lend him ten dollars to bribe the police, he should be in a dreadful scrape. We referred him to the master of the house, who said something to him which caused him to depart precipitately, and we never saw him again; but we heard afterwards that he had been to the other foreigners in the neighbourhood with various histories. We made more enquiries about him in the town, and it appeared that his expedition to Tezcuco was improvised when he saw us going down to the boat, and of course the visit to the rich old lady was purely imaginary. Now this youth was not more than eighteen, and looked and spoke like a gentleman. They say that the class he belonged to is to be counted rather by thousands than by hundreds in Mexico. They are the children of white Creoles, or nearly white mestizos; they get a superficial education and the art of dressing, and with this slender capital go out into the world to live by their wits, until they get a government appointment or set up as political adventurers, and so have a chance of helping themselves out of the public purse, which is naturally easier and more profitable than mere sponging upon individuals. One gets to understand the course of Mexican affairs much better by knowing what sort of raw material the politicians are recruited from.
We saw some good things in a small collection of antiquities, on this second visit to Tezcuco. Among them was a nude female figure in alabaster, four or five feet high, and—comparatively speaking—of high artistic merit. Such figures are not common in Mexico, and they are supposed to represent the Aztec Venus, who was called Tlazolteocihua, “Goddess of Pleasure.” A figure, laboriously cut in hard stone, representing a man wearing a jackal’s head as a mask, was supposed to be a figurative representation of the celebrated king of Tezcuco, Nezahualcoyotl, “hungry jackal,” of whom Mexican history relates that he walked about the streets of his capital in disguise, after the manner of the Caliph in the Arabian Nights. The explanation is plausible, but I think not