While thus engaged a cadaverous unshaved grey-haired man in a blue shirt, split shoes, and one large iron spur, introduced himself. “It isn’t often one finds Americans here, let me shake your hand.” He said he was American, had lived here many years, on a ranch, and that he was a Doctor. Three finger nails were missing from the right hand. He wore spectacles but had a distant look as if he saw not what he saw. A living Rip van Winkle. “Going to Tampico? a three days trip”--he said. “Three days? you mean ten hours.” “Three days” he repeated--“on a good horse”--so!--the train was not for him. “The train breaks down” he said contemptuously, as though anyone would entrust themselves to a train who had a good horse. He limped away without another word. We crossed the street to another store and a young man with an American accent waylaid us “Pardon me is your party complete? a white man’s body lies drowned a short way up the river”--he said it in a tone of perfect detachment and indifference. The body was there and must be identified. We hesitated a moment, looked round at our party, there were three or four odd members of our camp--we were complete. Further down the village street a horse was lying with its four feet tied together and two men operating on its mouth with a big carving knife. The horse groaned and sniffed and sighed and blood flowed. Approaching us on all fours was a child of five or six. Like a quadruped it walked, a cursed thing, doomed from birth. It looked at us cross-eyed, and its face was the face of a little wild animal. We did not go to see the corpse, the others went laughing and whistling, cracking grim jokes,--the law in Mexico is that no body may be removed from the water until identified. They told us on their return, that it had been in the water two weeks, it was floating on its stomach, fishes had eaten the face, vultures were hovering about the back. “Someone drowned”--and that’s all that mattered, but on a Sunday morning how diverting for the village! SEPTEMBER, 1921. _In Camp--Mexico._ Last week we were joined by an Anglo-French-Dutch-American born in Chicago--a man with a close cropped head looking like a convict; he was reputed an anarchist and a dynamiter. He did not fit in with the spirit of our camp. He said of me that I was a poor Socialist, too imperious in tone. I said of him that he was a poor Anarchist, too autocratic. He talked to the servants like dogs, and to his equals as subordinates. Within 15 minutes of his arrival, the camp was simmering with indignation. Pedro, the lad of the village, who offered his services and was taken as waiter, and who always smiles when asked for anything, opened wide his black eyes, and looked wonderingly at this strange new personality.