or portico. He is devoted to pulque and music; for, whilst he drains his social glass in the pulqueria amid a crowd of companion leperos, he is ever ready to sing a stave or make a verse in which a spice of wit or satire is certainly found. When he has earned a dollar by toil, he quits his labor even before it is completed, in order to spend his enormous gain. His wants are so small that he may be liberal in his vices. He regards work as an odious imposition upon human nature; and, created merely to live, he takes care only of to-day leaving to-morrow to take care of itself. Prudence, he thinks, would be a manifest distrust of Providence. His food, purchased at the corner of a street from one of the peripatetic cooks, consists of a few tortillas or corncakes, steeped in a pan of Chili peppers compounded with lard. A fragment of beef or fowl sometimes gives zest to the frugal mess. His dress, of narrow cotton or leather trowsers, and a blanket which is at once, bed, bedding, coat and cloak,—is worn season after season without washing, except during the providential ablutions of rain, until the mingled attrition of dirt and time entirely destroy the materials. An occasional crime, or quarrel, which is terminated by a resort to knives and copious phlebotomy, sends him several