Rabago is a very clever man, endowed to a high degree with the peculiarly caustic type of Latin-American wit, whose natural object here seems always to be Mexico’s kaleidoscopic government. His paper _El Mañana_ did more than anything else to kill Madero by perseveringly reflecting his weaknesses in a mirror of ridicule. On account of his opposition to the Maderos and his Porfirista sympathies he was taken up by the aristocratic class and has been of immense service to Huerta, a sort of bridge between him and them. But how far the advice to resign, which he swears that he has urged on Huerta, will be followed remains to be seen. Huerta has a deep, strange, Indian psychology entirely unfamiliar to us, which is at work on the situation, and the results cannot be predicted. It was amusing to see the various ministers arrive at the Embassy, one after the other, to assure N. that there had been no conference of ministers at Vera Cruz with Mr. Lind. They intend to uphold the protocol, and wouldn’t be caught flirting with an unknown official quantity behind N.’s back for anything in the world.... Huerta easily gets suspicious and I dare say the whole proceeding is spoiled. N. goes to-day with the ultimatum to the President himself, and we shall see what we shall see. It is all very uncertain, but intensely interesting, in the magnetic, highly colored, Latin-American way. It makes London, Paris, and New York seem very banal. Just home, after leaving N. at the _Palacio_, where the answer to the ultimatum is supposed to be forthcoming. All the clerks are here, in readiness to get off despatches. On my way back I stopped at the Alameda for a belated look at the booths stocked with the articles appropriate, according to Aztec ideas, for All Saints’ Day and the Feast of the Dead. Countless Indians, picturesque and mysterious, flood into the city, build their booths, stay a few days, and then silently ebb away, unseen until the next occasion--Christmas. Great bunches of a yellow flower--_cinco llagas_, “Flower of Death,” the Indians call it--are everywhere for sale, to be placed afterward on the evanescent graves. Toy death’s-heads and small toy coffins of all sorts abound. A favorite device is one whereby a string is pulled, the dead man raises his head, and when one lets go he falls back with a rattling sound. It is all a bit _macabre_, sold by these imperturbable Indians of the plateau, who are far from being a jovial race. Pulque and their other drinks often induce silence and melancholy rather than hilarity. They never sing nor whistle in the streets. They almost never dance. If they go through a few figures it is mostly in a solemn manner and on the occasion of some church festival, when they dance and gesticulate, strangely garlanded, in the _patio_ of the church itself.