There were several shops round the market-place at Grande, and the brandy-drinking was going on much as at Soquital.  The shops in these small towns are general stores, like “the shop” in coal- and iron-districts in England.  It is only in large towns that the different retail-trades are separated.  One thing is very noticeable in these country stores, the certainty of finding a great stock of sardines in bright tin boxes.  The idea of finding Sardines a l’huile in Indian villages seemed odd enough; but the fact is, that the difficulty of getting fish up from the coast is so great that these sardines are not much dearer than anything else, and they go a long way.  Montezuma’s method of supplying his table with fresh fish from the gulf, by having relays of Indian porters to run up with it, is too expensive for general use, and there is no efficient substitute.  It is in consequence of this scarcity of fish, that Church-fasts have never been very strictly kept in Mexico.

[Illustration:  HIEROGLYPHICS.]

The method of keeping accounts in the shops—­which, it is to be remembered, are almost always kept by white or half-white people, hardly ever by Indians—­is primitive enough.  Here is a score which I copied, the hieroglyphics standing for dollars, half-dollars, medios or half-reals, cuartillos or quarter-reals, and tlacos—­or clacos—­which are eighths of a real, or about 3/4d.  While account-keeping among the comparatively educated trades-people is in this condition, one can easily understand how very limited the Indian notions of calculation are.  They cannot realize any number much over ten; and twenty—­cempoalli—­is with them the symbol of a great number, as a hundred was with the Greeks.  There is in Mexico a mountain called in this indefinite way “Cempoatepetl”—­the twenty-mountain.  Sartorius mentions the Indian name of the many-petaled marigold—­“cempoaxochitl”—­the twenty-flower.  We traded for some trifles of aloe-fibre, but soon had to count up the reckoning with beans.

I have delayed long enough for the present over the Indians and their market; so, though there is much more to be said about them, I will only add a few words respecting the commodities for sale, and then leave them for awhile.

There seemed to be a large business doing in costales (bags) made of aloe-fibre, for carrying ore about in the mines.  True to the traditions of his ancestors, the Indian much prefers putting his load in a bag on his back, to the far easier method of wheeling it about.  Lazos sold at one to four reals, (6d. to 2s.) according to quality.  There are two kinds of aloe-fibre; one coarse, ichtli, the other much finer, pito; the first made from the great aloe that produces pulque, the other from a much smaller species of the same genus.  The stones with which the boiled maize is ground into the paste of which the universal tortillas are made were to be had here; indeed, they are made in the neighbourhood, of the basalt and lava which