“How’s that?”

And then Juan goes on to explain that the recent unusually wet weather has made many lame, etc., etc., to which the superintendent listens with a grave countenance.  Perhaps some unfortunate ewe has been bitten by a “cat,” or in some way received a wound in which the fly has deposited its malignant egg:  they lay her on her side and doctor her in company.  Finally, the superintendent gives the herder some tobacco, some cigarette-papers, and a couple of yards of yellow fuse, and, mounting his horse, nods farewell, and Juan touches his hat, smiles, and says, “Adios.”

In the ordinary course of events this is his weekly allowance of human intercourse.  It was the common opinion that none but Juan and his brethren could stand this sort of thing; but what there is in the Mexican character that adapts him to it only becomes a mystery on acquaintance therewith.  His most obvious and, one inclines to think, his highest and most estimable quality is his sociability.  He has a sense of the agreeableness of life, with a very considerable feeling for manners.  This feeling makes it a pleasure for him to meet you; it causes him to put himself into the most commonplace conversation, the simplest greeting, and make it, in his small way, a matter of art.  It makes it a pleasure for him to call upon a friend beneath the shade of some live-oak or in a dugout or jacal, carrying some white sugar for his wife or some candy for his little ones.  Our instinctive disposition to infer deplorable lacunae in the region of morals from the possession of a talent for manners is in the case of the poor Mexican too thoroughly justified.  For him there is no such region; it is an undiscovered country.  He is the lightest of light-weights.  When his heart is warmest he is tossing a silver dollar in the air and thinking; of monte.  Cimental herded industriously during the winter, and became the proud possessor of a horse and saddle, a Winchester, and a big ivory-handled pistol.  In May, shearing going on, he drove his flock to the shearing-shed, and spent the night at the ranch.  In the morning he came into the store laughing.  What about?  Oh, he had had a little monte over-night, and horse, saddle, rifle, revolver, all were gone.  He had been shorn of half a year’s growth.  But there was still a large deposit at his bank,—­the bank of Momus.

The herder has, of course, his “consolatory interstices and sprinklings of freedom;” he undoubtedly mitigates his solitary life by frequent derelictions, nightly visits to the farm—­settlements (or the jacal) which a few possess, and where he keeps, possibly, a wife and family.  But, on the whole, his life, and not unfrequently his death, is lonely, Just before shearing-time Juan Lucio and his flock were lost.  The flock was found, but not Juan.  It was impossible to say what had become of him:  he had a reputation for steadiness, and