Christmas week is a grand time for Tizimin, for it heralds in the great local _fiesta_ of the year, a feast which lasts from Christmas day till the New Year. Though synchronous with our Yuletide, it is not in celebration of that, but in honour of the local patron saint. The great feature of this gala are the bullfights. It is really doing them too much honour, though, to give them this dignified name; for they are really nothing less than a series of cowardly baitings of young bullocks. Ichabod! Ichabod! The glory of the bull-ring hath departed from Yucatan. We shall have more to say of this decadent torturing of domesticated animals in a later chapter. But the people "see blood," and in this respect the Indians are as bad as the mongrel usurpers of their country, and crowds flock in from the settlements for miles round. They bring with them their wives, their children, and packs of dogs; the babies astride their mother's hips, the bigger children clinging to her huipil; while the men bend under huge loads of basket-baggage slung on their backs, but the whole dead weight of which is on the man's forehead, the broad plaited string of the basket passing just above his eyes. This is the queer way that all the Mayan Indians carry loads; and as you pass them they look up at you from under the strings, their uneasy attitude giving their eyes a quite unfair appearance of sneaky shiftiness. This fiesta week, then, we had the local life of Tizimin at its brightest. The plaza turns itself into a fair, with rows of tiny wooden booths whereat cheap gewgaws and tasteless finery in cottons and tinsels, necklaces of beads and the inevitable rosaries hung with cheap gilt crosses, bankrupt the Indian wife; while her lord fuddles himself with liquid poisons at the drinking-shops. Foodstuffs leap up to famine prices. The skinny fowl which would have cost you a dollar (two shillings) "booms" to three; eager crowds surround the butchers' stalls where from dawn are trays, none too clean, piled up with blood-boltered lumps of meat (they never cut their beef in joints in Yucatan) calculated to rob an average tom-cat of his appetite. Trays of unspeakably sticky sweets reek in the sun, surrounded by eager-faced children. Strung like onions, hundreds of tortillas hang festooned on strings round the shops, as if some huge type of yellow mushroom had been utilised for decoration. Hour after hour gallop into the dusty plaza _caballeros_ from the local plantations--fine young dandies these! who fancy themselves, intent on conquests among some of those black-eyed girls who stare from the shaded doorways as they clatter past. The three-muled waggon, too, huge-wheeled, shaded with green canvas, rolls its lumbering way into the town, bringing some family from Espita or Valladolid; and the tired mules, released from their rope and leather trappings, look about for the dustiest spot in the plaza and roll and roll and roll, backwards and forwards, in an ecstasy of freedom, to