The great day of the elections--the 26th--passed off, not only without disturbance, but without voters or votes! The candidates so talked of during these last days were conspicuous by their absence. Felix Diaz was afraid to come to the capital, though all “assurances”--whatever that may mean--had been given him. In Vera Cruz he stayed at a second-rate hotel, next door to the American Consulate--the Stars and Stripes, doubtless, looking very comfortable from an accessible roof-to-roof vantage-ground. He has missed, fatalistically, it would seem, the occasions whereby he might have become ruler of Mexico. He is a gentleman, rather in our sense of the word, and the name he bears is linked to the many glories of Mexico, but this is, probably, his political burial. Already opportunity has called him thrice--Vera Cruz, in 1912; then Mexico City, in February, 1913; now again at Vera Cruz, in October, 1913; and still another wields the destinies of Mexico. The _chers collègues_ prophesy that we shall be here until next May, when probably new elections will be held. The consensus of opinion is that I might as well get the much-discussed drawing-room curtains and the rest, though I can’t feel enthusiastic about ordering a lot of things that may come in only as I go out. The dining-room continues to strike me as a terribly bleak place, like all north rooms in the tropics. I must say that one has very little hunger at this height, where the processes of digestion are much slower than at ordinary altitudes. When one has eaten a soup of some sort, a dish of rice garnished with eggs, bacon, and bananas (which any Mexican can do beautifully), or one of the delicious light omelettes--_tortilla de huevos_--topped off by some of the little, wild, fragrant strawberries almost perennial here, and over which wine is poured as a microbe-killer, one’s “engine is stoked” for twenty-four hours. There have just been the usual parleyings about the brandy for the turkey--the _guajolote_, the Indians call him--the ancestral bird of Mexico. The Aztecs ate, and continue to eat, him; and good cooks have the habit of giving him the following happy death: on the morning of the day on which you are to eat him, you generally hear him gobbling about. Then there is the demand for whisky or brandy “_por el guajolote, pobrecito_.” The unfortunate (or fortunate) bird is then allowed to drink himself to death. This is the effective way of rendering him chewable, it being impossible to hang meats at this altitude. The flesh becomes soft and white and juicy. But try a gravel-fed _guajolote_ that has not gone to damnation!