reconciled in anticipation of the great day of reckoning which all believed to be imminent.[1]
But the threatened judgment was postponed for a while, and soon men gambled and quarrelled and cheated each other as in the good old days of Cortés and Alvarado. As for the poor, those who were left houseless and penniless by the disaster, they begged, and generally in vain, for assistance in repairing their shattered dwellings. Fortunately, however, they met with a good friend in Linares, who spared neither income nor private fortune in relieving their wants; supplied funds for rebuilding, and kept the public granaries filled with maize, which he distributed to the destitute at his own expense, and to the less needy at the lowest possible price.
Disastrous as was the year 1711, it was but the precursor of yet more calamitous days. In 1713 premature frosts completely destroyed the crops, not only in the valley of Mexico, but in all the table lands of New Spain. The viceroy bestirred himself with his usual energy, and at great personal sacrifice succeeded in filling the granaries of the capital. But during the following year the supply became exhausted, or at least the supply available for the poor. Soon pestilence followed; and through the fair streets of the metropolis wandered gaunt and plague-stricken figures, begging with feeble voice and vainly stretching out their hands for bread.[2]
The wants of the sick and destitute were to some extent relieved by the viceroy, the archbishop, and the charitable institutions of Mexico; but elsewhere even greater sufferings were experienced, and fresh catastrophes added to the prevailing distress. On the night of the 15th of May, 1714, the province of
- ↑ Zamacois, Hist. Méj., v. 525-6; Alegre, Hist. Compend., iii. 158. During 1711, a snow storm occurred in the valley of Mexico, the only one mentioned from that date until 1767.
- ↑ The gloom now pervading the city was increased by the news that the wife of Felipe V. was dead; the people being ordered to wear mourning in her memory. Rivera, Hist. Jalapa, i. 109.
