Unofficial letters of an official's wife [by] Edith Moses.

UNOFFICIAL LETTERS OF

fiesta is a mask for an uprising on a large scale,
and all American women and children have been
warned not to go on the streets. There was an
officer here last night who assured me that the
banquet was a trap, and that the Americans who
went would probably all be murdered. As the
Commissioners are invited and have accepted the
invitation it was a pleasant suggestion. The military governor has refused to be present from the
beginning, but the promoters still call it a banquet
in his honor. Our guards were tripled last night
and their belts contain three rows of cartridges.
They told me their orders are " shoot to kill." This
seems a cheerful way to prepare for a fiesta, doesn't
it? An officer who was dining here last evening
had on his pistols; he made me nervous. We don't
believe an insurrection is being planned, but one
cannot tell what an excitable people might do, and
it would be easy to murder us all.
July 27, 1900.
ATE last evening we went for a short time to
the Army and Navy Assembly. I think there
were about two hundred persons present. They
met in the Provost Marshal's building and danced
around the corridors. It was stifling and unusually
hot as the building is in the walled city. It was
hardly an aesthetic function, for after one or two
dances the ladies began to show the outlines of their
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