THE DESERT AND THE ROSE 19 



foot — unless he be robust and surrounded by a fam- 

 ily. On him or her I do not squander pity. Nor in 

 all the present up-to-dateness is compassion really 

 obligatory. 



But when a woman is far from robust, has an 

 embarrassing - (yet occasionally cheering) diversity 

 of tastes, looks after her own ranch, has periodic 

 calamities in her home which often necessitate night 

 as well as day work, existence has its wearing side. 

 Every variety of live stock must receive personal 

 supervision if it is to prosper. Stock cannot be 

 abandoned to the untender mercies of Mexican help, 

 although as will be told there are Mexicans who 

 prove themselves infinitely more trustworthy than 

 Americans in this respect — and in some others too. 



And in addition to these trifles there was — nay 

 is often to this day where the older and usually more 

 reliable peon is concerned — the language to be rec- 

 koned with. Ah, if it were a language! But it is 

 not. It is a patois. Frantic appeals are made to 

 Spanish dictionaries and grammars but to discover 

 that in cases too numerous to mention the Spanish 

 and the Mexican word have scarcely even a blood 

 relationship. Then out of window go those exasper- 

 ating volumes, and the stranger in a strange land, 

 settling into a strange home, must banish more im- 

 portant concerns from the harassed mind and 

 gather up stray weeds of Mexican speech from the 

 wayside — finding them after all sufficient for the 

 daily round. A simple receipt for fluency seems to 

 be the following: Sit down hard somewhere near 

 the tail end of every sentence and bawl. Or, as was 



