The climate of Guanajuato is unsurpassed. Brilliant sunshine flooded days like our early June, in which one must hurry to sweat in the noon time, while two blankets made comfortable covering at night. This is true of not only one season but the year around, during which the thermometer does not vary ten degrees. July is coldest and a fireplace not uncomfortable in the evening. An American resident who went home to one of the States bordering on Canada for his vacation sat wiping the sweat out of his eyes there, when one of his untraveled countrymen observed:
"You must feel very much at home in this heat after nine years in Mexico."
Whereupon the sufferer arose in disgust, packed his bag, and sped south to mosquitoless coolness.
The evening air is indescribable; all nature's changes of striking beauty; and the setting sun throwing its last rays on the Bufa, the salient points of that and the other peaks purple with light, with the valleys in deep shadow, is a sight worth tramping far to see.
I drifted down along the gully next morning, following the main street, which changed direction every few yards, "paved" with three-inch cobbles, the sidewalks two feet wide, leaving one pedestrian to jump off it each time two met. A diminutive streetcar drawn by mules with jingling bells passed now and then. Peons swarmed here also, but there was by no means the abject poverty of San Luis Potosi, and Americans seemed in considerable favor, as their mines in the vicinity give the town its livelihood. I was seeking the famous old "Alóndiga," but the policeman I asked began looking at the names of the shops along the way as if he fancied it some tobacco booth. I tried again by designating it as "la cárcel." He still shook his head sadly. But when I described it as the place where Father Hidalgo's head hung on a hook for thirteen years, a great light broke suddenly upon him and he at once abandoned his beat and led me several blocks, refusing to be shaken off. What I first took for extreme courtesy, however, turned out to be merely the quest of tips, an activity in which the police of most Mexican cities are scarcely outdone by the waiters along Broadway.
The ancient building was outwardly plain and nearly square, more massive than the rest of the city. High up on each of its corners under the rusted hooks were the names of the four early opponents of Spanish rule whose heads had once hung there. Inside the corridor stood the statue of the peon who is said to have reached and fired the building under cover of the huge slab of stone on his back. When I had waited a while in the anteroom, the _jefe político_, the supreme commander of the city appointed by the governor of the State, appeared, the entire roomful of officials and visitors dropping their cigarettes and rising to greet him with bared heads. He gave me permission to enter, and the _presidente_, a podgy second jailor, took me in charge as the iron door opened to let me in. The walls once red with the blood of Spaniards slaughtered by the forces of the priest of Dolores had lost that tint in the century since passed, and were smeared with nothing more startling than a certain lack of cleanliness. The immense, three-story, stone building of colonial days enclosed a vast patio in which prisoners seemed to enjoy complete freedom, lying about the yard in the brilliant sunshine, playing cards, or washing themselves and their scanty clothing in the huge stone fountain in the center. The so-called cells in which they were shut up in groups during the night were large chambers that once housed the colonial government. By day many of them work at weaving hats, baskets, brushes, and the like, to sell for their own benefit, thus being able to order food from outside and avoid the mess brought in barrels at two and seven of each afternoon for those dependent on government rations. Now and then a wife or feminine friend of one of the prisoners appeared at the grating with a basket of food. Several of the inmates were called one by one to the crack of an iron door in the wall to hear the sentence the judge had chosen to impose upon them in the quiet of his own home; for public jury trial is not customary in Spanish America.