January 20th
The papers have the report of the five hours’ conversation between Flores Magon and Lind at Vera Cruz. Lind is reported as saying: “Flores Magon is a splendid gentleman, with the welfare of Mexico at heart.”
We continually ask ourselves what is going to happen. Mexico is not, by any means, starved out; there is plenty of food, there is money for oil stock and bull-fights, and other necessaries. We may have to see Pancho Villa in a dress-suit. He has collected wives, as he would anything else, in his paso de vencedor through Mexico, and I understand that some of them are curios. I suppose accident will decide which one he will turn up with as “first lady in the land.” A recent portrait of one of them drove a woman we knew nearly crazy. It showed the “bride” decked out in an old family necklace forcibly taken from our friend, with other valuables, before her flight from Torreon.
Yesterday I went to the christening of the Corcuera Pimentel baby. The young mother, very pretty, was still in bed, enveloped in beautiful and costly laces, and the house was full of handsome relatives. After I had congratulated her, Don Luis, her father, took me out to tea. The table was laden with all sorts of delicacies, foreign and domestic. I partook of the delicious tamales, appetizingly done up and cooked in corn-husks à la Mexicaine, and drank atolli aurora, a thick, pink drink of corn-meal and milk, flavored with cinnamon and colored with a dash of carmine—though less exotic dainties were pressed on me.