_Poco trabajo_, Little work, _Mucho dinero_, Much money, _Pulque barato_, Cheap pulque, _Viva Madero!_ Long live Madero! It's a bit wabbly for founding a government on, but doubtless represents very accurately the dreams of the _pelados_ (skinned ones), as the peons are called. You speak of the subscriptions for the earthquake relief here. It was not a national disaster. National disasters take other forms in this latitude. Scarcely a ripple is left, and as for the money to repair the city and close the splits in the streets, the municipality gives that and the contractors jump for joy. I do not minimize the dangers here, but, of course, I don't draw highly colored pictures, being sure of your interest in any statement of facts, however plain they may be. I have rarely felt safer anywhere than in Mexico City; certainly never more comfortable and continually interested. We often walk home after dinners or bridge. The clean-washed air is so refreshing after being in rooms, however large, at this altitude. The gendarmes stand at every few crossings with their lanterns. The streets are deserted, dry, and clean. There is no _Nachtleben_. The program is here early to bed, early to rise, and the thrice-blessed siesta to renew the day. I am sending off a delightful book by Flandrau, _Viva Mexico_. It has the real sparkle and "feel" of this magnetic land. How true a word he spoke when he said, "One does not go to Latin-America just to see what it is like, or because one has seen it before and chosen to return, but because circumstances in their wonderfully lucid way have combined to send one." I have just had a letter from the King of Denmark. You know how promptly he always answers, _la politesse des rois_. But the old Copenhagen days with their blues and grays and Aryan ways of thought and habits of life are immeasurably remote from these, not only geographically and in time, but psychologically. The other evening at the Arbeu Theater, where Virginia Fabregas, an old favorite here, was playing, my eye was suddenly arrested by the profiles as I looked from the box down a row of seats. They were so diverse, so strange, like those one comes across on the ground floor in the corner rooms of museums--Mongol, Indian, Aryan. There did not seem to be any one type. It was just a patchwork loosely sewn together, the bits coming out of unknown generations from the desires of the four corners of the earth. _July 3d._