By degrees we were passed out into the corridor, and here we were brought to a dead stand. Within arm's length was an imp of a boy, apparently the ringleader in this nocturnal orgy, who stood on a platform, rattling a bag of balls, and whose unintermitted screeching, singsong cries had throughout risen shrill and distinct above every other sound. At that moment the noise and uproar were carried to the highest The whole house seemed rising against the boy, and he, single-handed, or rather single-tongued, was doing battle with the whole, sending forth a clear stream of vocal power, which for a while bore its way triumphantly through the whole troubled waters, till, finding himself overpowered by the immense majority, with a tone that set the whole mass in a roar, and showed his democratic principles, he cried out, "Vox populi est vox Dei!" and submitted. Along the corridor, and in the whole area of the patio, or courtyard, were tables, and benches, and papers, and grains of corn, and ponderous sticks, the same as in the sala, and men and women sitting as close together. The passages were choked up, and over the heads of those sitting at the tables, all within reach were bending their eyes earnestly upon the mysterious papers. They were grayheads, boys and girls, and little children; fathers and mothers; husbands and wives; masters and servants; men high in office, muleteers, and bull-fighters; senoras and senoritas, with jewels around their necks and roses in their hair, and Indian women, worth only the slight covering they had on; beauty and deformity; the best and the vilest in Merida; perhaps, in all, two thousand persons; and this great multitude, many of whom we had seen but a few minutes before on their knees in the church, and among them the fair bevy of girls who had stood by us on the steps, were now assembled in a public gambling-house! a beautiful spectacle for a stranger the first night of his arrival in the capital! But the devil is not so black as he is painted. I do not mean to offer any apology for gambling, in Yucatan, as in all the rest of Mexico, the bane and scourge of all ranks of society; but Merida is, in a small way, a city of my love, and I would fain raise this great mass of people from the gulf into which I have just plunged them: at least, I would lift their heads a little above water.