A visit to a mixed school, presided over by carelessly dressed maidens of uncertain age and the all-knowing glance of those who feel the world and all its knowledge lies concentrated in the hollow of their hands, showed a quite similar method of instruction. On the wall hung a great lithograph depicting in all its dreadful details the alleged horrors of "alcoolismo." Even the teachers rattled off their questions with an atrocious, half-enunciated pronunciation, and he must have been a Spanish scholar indeed who could have caught more than the gist of the recited answers. This indistinctness of enunciation and the Catholic system of learning by rote instead of permitting the development of individual power to think were as marked even in the _colegio_, corresponding roughly to our high schools. Even there the professor never commanded, "More distinctly!" but he frequently cried, "Faster!"
On the wall of this higher institution was a stern set of rules, among which some of the most important were:
"Students must not smoke in the presence of professors," though this was but mildly observed, for when I entered the study room with the director and his assistant, all of us smoking, the boys, averaging fifteen years of age, merely held their lighted cigarettes half out of sight behind them until we passed. Another rule read: "Any student frequenting a tavern, café chantant, or house of ill-fame may be expelled." He might run that risk in most schools, but none but the Latinized races would announce the fact in plain words on the bulletin-boards. The director complained that the recent revolutions had set the school far back, as each government left it to the next to provide for such secondary necessities.
A classmate of my boyhood was superintendent of the group of mines round about Guanajuato. From among them we chose "Pingüico" for my temporary employment. The ride to it, 8200 feet above the sea, up along and out of the gully in which Guanajuato is built, and by steep rocky trails sometimes beside sheer mountain walls, opens out many a marvelous vista; but none to compare with that from the office veranda of the mine itself. Two thousand feet below lies a plain of Mexico's great table-land, stretching forty miles or more across to where it is shut off by an endless range of mountains, backed by chain after blue chain, each cutting the sky-line in more jagged, fantastic fashion than the rest, the farther far beyond Guadalajara and surely more than a hundred miles distant, where Mexico falls away into the Pacific. On the left rises deep-blue into the sky the almost perfect flattened cone of a lone mountain. Brilliant yet not hot sunshine illuminated even the far horizon, and little cloud-shadows crawled here and there across the landscape. The rainy season had left on the plain below many shallow lakes that reflected the sun like immense mirrors. From the veranda it seemed quite flat, though in reality by no means so, and one could all but count the windows of Silao, Irapuato, and other towns; the second, though more than twenty miles away, still in the back foreground of the picture. Thread-like, brown trails wound away over the plain and up into the mountains, here and there dotted by travelers crawling ant-like along them a few inches an hour. Take the most perfect day of late May or early June in our North, brush off the clouds, make the air many times fresher and clearer, add October nights, and multiply the sum total by 365, and it is more easily understood why Americans who settle in the Guanajuato region so frequently remain there.