Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/446

 426 that takes the toll. Los Angeles, it is held, is to be the Lyons, and San Diego the Marseilles, of the State, San Francisco still remaining its Paris. The pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries and fern-like leaves, forms the leading shade and ornament of Los Angeles streets. Apart from these a clump of palms grows on San Pedro Street, and, before an odd, octagon-shaped house on Main Street, a Mexican nopal of the size of an apple-tree. In the court-yard of the principal hotel droops a single ragged banana. Tropical features in the vegetation are scarce, but it is evident that this is not the fault of the climate, but of failure to encourage them. In the door-yards are the Mexican aloe and the Spanish bayonet, from the adjacent deserts of Mohave and Arizona. The castor-oil plant grows a tall weed in neglected places. The extraction of castor-oil was at one time an industry of the place, but is now abandoned.

The Mexican element must be something like one-third of the entire population of the place. In the Spanish town, "Sonora," the recollection of Mexico is revived, but a very shabby, provincial Mexico. You find mescal and tequila, the two varieties of intoxicating liquor distilled from the maguey, or aloe. The dingy little adobe shops contain samples of dingy little stocks of goods in their shuttered loop-holes of windows. A few swarthy, lantern-jawed old-timers hang about the corners, and gossip in patois, and women with black shawls over their heads pass by. Much of the quarter is in a ruinous condition. There remain vestiges of the arcade system of the kind known in some form to all tropical or semi-tropical climates. The arcades of Sonora are not of massive