THE MEXICAN OLD WOMEN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3243, 22 November 1881, Page 4

THE MEXICAN OLD WOMEN.

There seems to be a most unnecessary number of old women in Santa Fe. To be sure, it is a garrison town, and at least two old women are required to look after each, young one. They are queer old bodies— brown as a bit of well cured bacon, and with a shrivelledness that still further suggests their having: been hung up for a good many years in the smoke. They dress in black, and wear—after the custom of the country —black shawls over their heads. Sometimes these shawls are drawn over their faces, slantwise, so that only their eyes and a bit of forehead are seen. Thus arrayed, they seem to be droll caricatures of the beauties of Lima —as those justly celebrated young women appear in the illustrated geographies. And there is a preoccupied expression in the face —when it i 9 visible—and in the work of these old women that still more closely seems to associate them with some untold romance. They walk almost swiftly— which in itself is remarkable in their slow moving land; and they actually seem to be going somewhere —which is more remarkable still. As they glide rapidly along in the twilight, keeping close in the shadow of the houses, or beneath, the shade of the high walls which girt tlie garden, they seem figures broken out from one of the love poems of old Spain. You fancy that the bundles which they carry are tho wardrobes of the love-tormented Donna Claras and Donna Isabels, who this very night will scale the gai'den wall and blithely flee away in their lovers' arms. Thie is a pretty fancy, but I fear that it is not founded altogether upon fact. For the most part the old women seem to be washerwomen, and their bundles are clothes going to and from the wash. The proportion of young women to old is, as I have said, annoyingly small. Now and then a slim, gracious, little body comes lightly long —black haired, browneyed, with a warm, brown skin that is made warmer by the rich red tints of her Southern blood—but she is gone in a moment, leaving you to sigh all vainly for her return. This saddening scarcity of young, pretty women is due to the fact that at 30 a Mexican woman is old ; a good many of them are old at 25. For tho remainder of their lives they grow browner and browner, and more and more shrivelled, until finally—having become quite dried up—they probably blow away. —Santa Fe correspondent St. Louis Globe Democrat.