boundary disputes with Mexico, and are the result of much hard work on the part of survey expeditions led by Professor Rockstroh and Mr. Miles Rock, which were attended by much suffering and loss of life.
Our room in the convento was only a monk's cell, windowless, and infested with rats and mice. It opened into a long gallery, with a kitchen at one end and at the other a door leading into the church. The monks had of course long ago disappeared from the scene, and at the present time there is not even a cura resident in the village. One of the cells was used as a school for girls who were taught by a Ladino woman. There was much interest taken in us by these queer-looking scholars, clad in white huipils and blue enaguas, who fluttered about us like frightened birds, we being probably the first of our kind they had ever seen.
The little village was in no way pretty, but the climate was exceedingly pleasant, the blossoms on the orange-trees in the plaza filled the air with perfume, the green hills round us were refreshing to look at, and our tired animals fared sumptuously. Our housekeeping was of the usual primitive kind; we set up our dining-table in the gallery, and cooked our food at a fire on the ground just outside. The kitchen of the convento was closed and we were refused the use of it, but on the third day of our stay several bustling Ladino women took possession of it, kindled big fires, put on huge pots to boil, and set to work to pluck and prepare numberless fowls, all in anticipation of the Jefe's visit. Whilst these matters were in progress down swooped an angry company of Indian "mayores," the town councillors of the Indian Municipality, who for some minutes stood at the kitchen door and pelted the cooks with hard-sounding words, which in their monosyllabic language seemed literally to fly from their mouths like peas from a boy's pea-shooter. It was a question of firewood: someone had clearly stolen somebody else's firewood, but who stole whose and how the matter was settled we never knew; however, the cooks seemed to have the best of it, for, after the charge was made, all talked at once for the space of ten minutes at the top of their voices, and then the "mayores" retired, looking more important and superior than when they arrived.
The preparations for the Jefe and his party seemed to exhaust the food-supply of the village, and nothing more could be bought; but luckily we had bespoken a turkey on the day we arrived, and a magnificent bird he looked, when just as we were starting on a ramble, we met him being led home in triumph by our boys, Caralampio having hold of the extreme end of one outstretched wing, and Santos of the other, whilst the turkey paced solemnly between them. When we returned from our walk we found our household with their heads together in deep consultation; the turkey had been killed
