The Pit

The crow of the fighting cock is Porto Rico's national anthem, sung from early dawn to murmurous dusk by spur-legged game-birds tethered in squalid door-yards all over the island. On Sundays the national anthem is stilled. Those sacks you see the natives carrying along the white roads on Sunday morning contain the coxcomb choir. They are going to the cockpits, where a knife, a flask of bitter liquor, volleys of cheers and curses, the chink of coin, the spurt of dust and blood --not always fowl blood--spell life's zest for the brown-skinned jibaro (peasant). Porto Rican poets hymn the sport as the essence of manhood and beauty.

When laws are passed in the U. S. prohibiting Sunday golf, great is the outcry. Laws have been passed in Porto Rico prohibiting cockfighting on Sundays and on every other day. But there is no outcry, except among the politicos. The politicos lately passed a bill repealing their harshest prohibition. Last fortnight Governor Horace Mann Towner vetoed the act and repeated that cockfighting is "a barbarous and cruel sport." But people said the law would not matter one way or the other. The jibaro pays no attention, saving his breath for the secret pit, the dashing fury of his little bird, the hot argument or epic narrative afterward.