I am sending you a photograph of the "Man of the Hour." As you will see, being photographed is not his "forte"; he sits wooden-faced in a huge, carved armchair, with a copy of the Constitution in his hands and the date 1857 picked out in shining white on the covers. He is now in Yucatan, making one of his accustomed political _tournées_. He is developing into a sort of "Reise-Kaiser." It is rumored that from the state of sisal and henequen he will pick his running-mate. Gen. Bernardo Reyes was stoned and robbed and mobbed when he attempted to make a speech the other day, and things are pretty noisy. He was rescued by the police from the infuriated mob with the greatest difficulty. He had just resigned his commission in the army in order to be ready to serve an evidently unwilling country as Chief Executive. _September 12th, evening._ I sent you a rather hasty line this morning in commemoration of ----'s birthday, the best and most faithful of friends for this life and the next. I went to early Mass to San Lorenzo, in the old part of the town, one of the ways of seeing Mexico City. Indians were sweeping the Alameda as I passed through, with brooms of dry bushes tied on to long sticks. A thin, pinky-white sun was filtering through the lovely trees, and watering-carts were in evidence, making rather scant tracings on the dusty, untrodden streets of the night. A little boy was drinking from a gutter, like some puppy--his morning meal, I suppose. I do hope he took the pennies I gave him to some place where he could fill his little "tummy." The population, Indian and Mestizo only, up and about their tasks, were shivering a little in the chilly morning. Long lines of _arrieros_, bringing their heavily laden donkeys into town with the day's provision for _le ventre de Mexico_, were prodding and exhorting their burros none too gently. Priests introduced the donkey here in the sixteenth century, to relieve the Indian of his burdens, and the poor beasts have had an awful time ever since. The only live stock for whose comfort the Indians are really solicitous is the fighting-cock. _He_ is fed, _he_ is housed, and his vagaries and exigencies are tenderly followed. Elim has just asked me, with a hopeful gleam in his young eye, what "raining cats and dogs" means, a side-light on the afternoon weather. The government would love to defer the elections for a while, but the authorities don't dare not carry out the promised program.