How large families can live on the proceeds of these small stands is a mystery. Everything is dust-covered, handled and rehandled, cut into small bits and then into still smaller ones. I always marvel at the self-restraint that prevents the Indians from falling on their own goods and devouring them. One drives over what was once an Aztec causeway, through a squalid suburb, San Antonio de Abad, to get back into town, where the day of the dead was celebrated by an unusually lively attendance at the pulque-shops. That _licor divino_ had so incapacitated an Indian lying on the road that we nearly lost our lives in the sudden swerve the chauffeur made to avoid running over him. There are numberless accidents to Indians, falling on the third rail of the tramways running out the Tlalpan road, though it is wired off. When you look into the awful pink and blue dens, and smell the still more awful smell of the _licor divino_, and see the Indians saddened and melancholy, or suddenly wild and completely irresponsible, coming out of _La Encantadora_, _Las Emociones_, or _El Hombre Perdido_,[19] you realize that the maguey is, indeed, bound up with the destiny of the Mexican nation. As we passed through the Calle de Flamencos, the celebrated palace of the Conde de Santiago seemed once more splendid, rising above the squalor of the pulque-shops. It was built by a cousin of Cortés, immediately after the Conquest, in what was then a noble quarter of the town. Later, when the Conde de Santiago bought it, he surrounded it by a beautiful park, known as the Parque del Conde. Now in the great courtyard, alas! only merchandise of a tenth-rate quality is stored and old trucks encumber and disfigure it. There is a majestic stairway, seen through a wide, carved entrance still possessing its antique wooden doors of some wonderful resisting wood from the Hot Country. The roof-line is just as good as the rest, for great stone gargoyles, representing half-cannon, show themselves against the sky. There is a huge Aztec corner-stone of a single piece, representing a tiger, which tradition says was placed there by Cortés himself. It is the sort of house the government ought to buy; in this dry climate, properly preserved, it would be good for a thousand years.[20] _November 5th._ Yesterday an event unique in the troubled political history of Mexico took place. President de la Barra calmly read the report of his incumbency before the Chamber of Deputies and as calmly relinquished his high office.