20 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 



within reach were bending their eyes earnestly upon 

 the mysterious papers. They were grayheads, 

 boys and girls, and little children ; fathers and moth- 

 ers ; husbands and wives ; masters and servants ; men 

 high in office, muleteers, and bull-fighters ; senoras 

 and senoritas, with jewels around their necks and 

 roses in their hair, and Indian women, worth only 

 the slight covering they had on ; beauty and deform- 

 ity ; the best and the vilest in Merida ; perhaps, in 

 all, two thousand persons ; and this great multitude, 

 many of whom we had seen but a few minutes before 

 on their knees in the church, and among them the 

 fair bevy of girls w T ho had stood by us on the steps, 

 were now assembled in a public gambling-house ! a 

 beautiful spectacle for a stranger the first night of 

 his arrival in the capital ! 



But the devil is not so black as he is painted. I 

 do not mean to offer any apology for gambling, in 

 Yucatan, as in all the rest of Mexico, the bane and 

 scourge of all ranks of society ; but Merida is, in a 

 small way, a city of my love, and I would fain raise 

 this great mass of people from the gulf into which I 

 have just plunged them : at least, I would lift their 

 heads a little above water. 



The game which they were engaged in playing 

 is called La Loteria, or the Lottery. It is a favour- 

 ite amusement throughout all the Mexican provin- 

 ces, and extends to every village in Yucatan. It is 

 authorized by the government, and, as was former- 

 ly the case to a pernicious extent with the lotteries 



