other habit of theirs brings them into contact with the "reasonable
people," not to their advantage. They are excessively litigious, and
their continual law-suits take them to the large towns where the courts
of justice are held, and where lawyers' fees swallow up a large
proportion of their savings. There is a natural connexion between
farming and law-suits; and the taste for writs and hard swearing is as
remarkable among this agricultural people as it is among our own small
farmers in England.

Theoretically, the Indians in their villages live under the general
government, like any other citizens; for, since the establishment of
the republic, the civil disabilities which had kept them down for three
centuries were all abolished at a sweep, and the brown people have
their votes, and are eligible for any office. Practically, these
advantages do not come to much at present, for custom, which is
stronger than law, keeps them under the government of their own
aristocracy, composed of certain families whose nobility dates beyond
the Conquest, and was always recognized by the Spaniards. These noble
Indians seem to be pretty much as dirty, as ignorant, and as idle as
the plebeians--the ordinary field-labourers or "_earth-hands_"
(_tlalmaitl_), as they were called in ancient times,--and a stranger
cannot recognize their claims to superiority by anything in their
houses, dress, language, or bearing; nevertheless, they are the
patrician families, and republicanism has not yet deprived them of
their power over the other Indians. In early times, when men of white
or mixed blood were few in the country, it suited the Spanish
government to maintain the authority of these families, who collected
the taxes and managed the estates of the little communities. The common
people were the sufferers by this arrangement, for the Alcaldes of
their own race cheated them without mercy, and were harder upon them
than even their white rulers, just as on slave-estates a black driver
is much severer than a white one.

Near some of the houses we noticed that curious institution--the
_temazcalli_, which corresponds exactly to the Russian vapour-bath. It
is a sort of oven, into which the bather creeps on all fours, and lies
down, and the stones at one end are heated by a fire outside. Upon
these stones the bather sprinkles cold water, which fills the place
with suffocating steam. When he feels himself to have been sufficiently
sweated, he crawls out