Each booth is a small enclosure, built of low tables, shaded by a huge rectangular umbrella made of matting with four sticks only. A whole Indian family sits within at the receipt of custom. The old grandmother, her white hair smoothed down over her wrinkled old brown cheeks, with skinny trembling hands, but a glance like a hawk's, is taking pay or making change. Her daughter, the efficient business woman of the establishment, is young and active. Her long black hair is braided down her back, her eyes are bright, her teeth flash white when you make her smile by a joke about her prices. The father of the family lolls against the central post of the booth, tipping up his chair, after a custom not inherited from the Aztecs, but borrowed from a neighboring nation. The tables are heaped with little piles, like cannon-balls, of red _ciruelas_, yellow apricots, or green _abogatos_; in their season, delicious _grenaditas_, whose cup-like rind contains a juicy draught of luscious flavor. Oranges and bananas are on the table, under the table, over the table, everywhere. If you are very friendly, the old lady selects you as a gift the very best of all the bananas. Let not the wanderer from the north be surprised to find it is, according to his estimation, far gone in decay. The natives eat bananas only dead ripe, when they are beginning to grow soft,--not as they are found in the northern market, hard and indigestible after a long voyage without ripening influences. Hens and chickens are straying about, and a tough old rooster, tied by the leg, awaits the pot, after his purchaser shall have been found. You select such little heaps of fruit as please your inexperienced eye; a small _cargador_, all eyes and teeth, springs up from the earth at your feet, with a big loose basket on his back. Every thing you buy is tumbled into it; he follows you from stall to stall, accumulating such treasures as you select. You will not be able to resist several specimens of native pottery. This is generally spread out on the ground, while the vendor sits behind it. Manufacture of coarse pottery is carried on everywhere, and different regions have their distinctive varieties, influenced by different colored clays and methods of treatment. The ware of Guadalajara is perhaps the most esteemed; it is of a soft gray in tint, polished but not glazed, and often delicately decorated with color and gold. But every village has its characteristic pottery, simple in form, pleasing in color, and although the pots and jugs are so fragile that it is hopeless to think of packing them securely, it is impossible to resist their attractions compared with the trifling sum demanded for them. The basket of your _cargador_, well filled with fruit and figs, and heaped high with sweet peas and poppies, the little fellow runs before you to the hotel where he deposits his burden, and goes away fully content with a _medio_ in his hand--6-1/4 cents.