It was exceptional when an hacienda hired a priest-instructor permanently. Since teachers were either poorly paid or were hacienda guests, they offered halfhearted service. Haciendas were known to neglect education intentionally: the peasant was to be kept subordinate--a little reading, a little writing, but no more. [Illustration: Hacienda de San Antonio, Guanajuato: 18th-century chapel ruin.] [Illustration: Hacienda de San Antonio, Colima: 17th-century chapel and terminus of aqueduct.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Jajalpa, D.F.: pink stucco sixteen-room, red-tiled 19th-century residence and chapel.] [Illustration: Hacienda San Cayetano, Nayarit: one of a pair of pink ceramic lions at entry to residence.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Guarache, Michoacán: residence and chapel. Now a government school.] [Illustration: Hacienda de Petaca, Guanajuato: residence.] Usually the main hacienda residence housed the school. One of the twenty or thirty rooms was designated the classroom. It was small and had few or no windows; the open door let in light and air. Students in the sixteenth century sat on the floor. Later, they had benches and sat around a table, the _maestro_ at one end. Slates came into being in the eighteenth century; and, in the nineteenth century, blackboards. Engravings of the presidents began to decorate bare walls. Dirty, foxed maps hid stains. Tiled floors were often cold and damp. Though there was sunshine most of the year, classes were never held under the laurel or palm trees. Girls sat on one side, boys on the other--if the room was large enough. There were no sanitary facilities, no health precautions, no hygiene instruction. At recess, the children drank from the patio fountain or cattle trough. [Illustration: Hacienda de Juana Guerra, Amado Nervo, Durango: millstone.] On an hacienda employing four hundred workers, about twenty children attended school. Since the hacienda was on a dawn-to-dark schedule, work never ran out; the average hacendado felt he could employ those skinny legs and arms to his advantage. At harvest time there were no classes; during fiestas there were no classes; if the _maestro_ got drunk there were no classes. Truancy was a fact of life. [Illustration: Hacienda Aguilera, Oaxaca: former 19th-century hacienda residence, now university building.] At school and at home the children played marbles, using clay marbles of their own baking. They spun tops and played jacks, tag, hide-and-seek, and a flower game called "Stealing a Soul." In "The Old Saints," the "buyer" dashed from one saint to another to see if his saint is the one he wants to buy. If the saint runs off and is caught he is given a "job" to do. A favorite song was "Golden Bell": _Little golden bell, Let me pass; With all my children Who are behind me._ Singing "La Víbora del Mar," the children divided into two groups; this was a tug-of-war song and is still remembered: