THELEPEROS. 41 
hundred feet, there is a rail between four and five feet high, and of propor- 
tionable thickness, composed of gold, silver, and a small alloy of Irasn. 
This is surmounted with silver statues for candles. In front of the altar is 
the choir, itself a church, built of dark woods of the rarest antique carving. 
The altar (placed upon a marble platform, elevating it from the floor of 
the building, and covered with gold and silver ornaments, candlesticks 
and crosses,) is of wrought and polished silver; and the whole is sur- 
mounted by a small temple, in which rests the figure of the Virgin of 
Remedies, who enjoys the exclusive right to three petticoats ; one emhroi- 
dered witli f earls, another with emeralds, and a third with diamonds, the value 
of which, I am credilly informed, is not less than three millions of dollars ! 
This, you will recollect, is onXj one part of one church in Mexico, and that 
one said not to be the richest ! 
Around this splendid mine of wealth are half-naked Indians, gaping 
with surprise, or kneeling to the figure of some favorite saint — the misery 
of the man a painful contrast with the splendor of the shrine ! 
Passing from the Cathedral door to the south-eastern portion of the city, 
you reach the outskirts, crossing, in your way, the canals from the lake. 
I have rarely seen such miserable suburbs ; they are filled with hovels 
built of sun-dried bricks, often worn with the weather to the shape of holes 
in the mud, while on their earthen floors crawl, cook, live and multiply, 
the wretched-looking population of Uperos. 
This word, I believe, is not pure Spanish, but is derived originally, it is 
said, from the Castilian lepra, or leper ; and although they do not suffer 
from that loathsome malady, they are quite as disgusting. 
Blacken a man in the sun ; let his hair grow long and tangled, or be- 
come filled with vermin ; let him plod about the streets in all kinds of 
dirt for years, and never know the use of brush, or towel, or water even, 
except in storms ; let him put on a pair of leather breeches at twenty, and 
wear them until forty, without change or ablution ; and, over all, place a 
torn and blackened hat, and a tattered blanket begrimed with abomi- 
nations ; let him have wild eyes, and shining teeth, and features pinched 
by famine into sharpness ; breasts bared and browned, and (if females) 
with two or three miniatures of the same species trotting after her, and 
another certainly strapped to her back : combine all these in your ima- 
gination, and you have a recipe for a Mexican lepero. 
There, on the canals, around the markets and pulque shops, the Indians 
and these miserable outcasts hang all day long ; feeding on fragments, 
quarrelling, drinking, stealing and lying drunk about the pavements, with 
their children crying with hunger around them. At night they slink off 
to these suburbs and coil themselves up on the damp floors of their lairs, 
to sleep off the effects of liquor, and to awake to another day of misery 
