Very few have telegraphic communication with the outside world, and none whatever with their own country. They mostly clip and translate items from their exchanges, heading them "Special telegrams," etc., when in reality they are from eight to ten days old. _El Monitor Republicano_ steals from its exchanges first and the other papers copy from it. Not a single paper has a reporter. Two men are considered plenty to clip and translate for a daily, and it is not unusual for them to borrow type to set the paper. All the type-setting is done in the daytime and a morning paper is ready for sale--if anybody wanted it--the afternoon before. While our morning newspapers allow their brains to rest at 5 A.M., the Mexican brethren cease labor the day before at 4 P.M. Things happening on the streets, which would make a "display head" with us, are never even mentioned by them. One day I saw a woman fall dead two squares away from a newspaper office, and after a long time read in the same paper: "One of our respected contemporaries is authority for the story than an unknown Indian woman dropped dead on the street about two weeks ago." It needed no label "castanado" (chestnut). For a time the papers imagined they had an item. There was an old Frenchman who made some sort of taffy and with it used to perambulate the streets crying, "Piruli." The English paper came out quoting a notice of this old fellow. In a few days they quoted another to the effect that the old fellow had died of smallpox. Then, after using space for one entire week, changing every other day the cause of the old man's death and substituting some new disease, the learned editor stated that according to all reports the old fellow was not dead at all, but had charmed some rich Mexican widow with his musical voice--or taffy--and was enjoying a honeymoon on her bank account. We even did not get peace with that, but in a few days they declared the report false and gave a new version. When we left there, five months later, they were still contradicting themselves about the old taffy-peddler. Quite as bad was their treatment of a small forest fire located about twenty miles from the city. I was at the village at the time, and was quite amused, when the fires were extinguished after eight hours' burning, to read for two weeks after contradictory stories on it. It was still raging with renewed energy--hundreds of lives had been lost, etc., until one morning the English paper said: "According to a letter received at this office yesterday, the forest fire only lasted a few hours, and our contemporaries, from whom we have been quoting, have made a big mistake. No lives were lost."