It felt pleasant, indeed, to bask in the sun a half hour after dinner before descending again. Toward five I tied and tagged the sacks of samples and followed them, on peon backs, to the shaft and to the world above with its hot and cold shower-bath, and the Chinaman's promise, thanks to the proximity of Irapuato, of "stlaybelly pie." Though the American force numbered several of those fruitless individuals that drift in and out of all mining communities, it was on the whole of rather high caliber. Besides "Sully the Pug," a mere human animal, hairy and muscular as a bear, and two "Texicans," as those born in the States of some Mexican blood and generally a touch of foreign accent are called, there were two engineers who lived with their "chinitas," or illiterate _mestizo_ Mexican wives and broods of peon children down in the valley below the dump-heap. Caste lines were not lacking even among the Americans in the "camp," as these call Guanajuato and its mining environs. More than one complained that those who married Mexican girls of unsullied character and even education were rated "squaw-men" and more or less ostracized by their fellow countrymen, and especially country-women, while the man who "picked up an old rounder from the States" was looked upon as an equal. The speech of all Mexico is slovenly from the Castilian point of view. Still more so was that of both the peon and the Americans, who copied the untutored tongue of the former, often ignorant of its faults, and generally not in the least anxious to improve, nor indeed to get any other advantage from the country except the gold and silver they could dig out of it. Laborers and bosses commonly used "pierra" for piedra; "sa' pa' fuera" for to leave the mine, "croquesí" for I believe so, commonly ignorant even of the fact that this is not a single word. In the mess-hall were heard strange mixtures of the two languages, as when a man rising to answer some call shouted over his shoulder: "Juan, deja mi pie alone!" Thanks to much peon intercourse, almost all the Americans had an unconsciously patronizing air even to their fellows, as many a pedagogue comes to address all the world in the tone of the schoolroom. The Mexican, like the Spaniard, never laughs at the most atrocious attempts at his tongue by foreigners, and even the peons were often extremely quick-witted in catching the idea from a few mispronounced words. "The man with the hair----," I said one day, in describing a workman I wished summoned; and not for the moment recalling the Castilian for curly, I twirled my fingers in the air.