Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/536

 516 ounce, and the carrier system for delivering letters has been introduced. Electric lights and telephones are now much in use. Tall poles with great lights upon them dominate the Central Plaza and other points, as in Union Square, New York. The trumpery that obscured the view of that most taking of subjects for a water-color sketch, the Sagrario, has been cleared away. A little garden has been established on the principal street, on the south side of the church of the Profesa, well known to all who have frequented the popular restaurant of the Concordia. These details show that the municipality is very favorably disposed towards the march of progress. An appropriation of $800,000 has put the palace of Chapultepec in habitable shape to be hereafter the official residence, or "the White House," of the presidents of Mexico. The Gautimozin, of the proposed line of statues along the Calzáda de la Reforma, leading to it, has been completed and set up, and the Juarez is well under way. A contract made some few years since with one Oscar A. Drorge, to plant two million of trees in the valley of Mexico, has not yet produced any noticeable results. They were to be principally eucalyptus, acacia, ash, willow, and poplar, and to cost $200,000 in all. In the mean time it has been discovered that the valley never was wooded, and that consequently the early Spaniards could not have been guilty of the vandalism of destroying the once magnificent forests, as often laid to their charge. The site must always have been essentially marshy, and the great ancient trees, the ahuchuetes, on its borders at Chapultepec, are shown to be a species of swamp cypress.

The Jockey Club, with a membership chiefly made up from the old and wealthy families, is one of the later features of life at the Capital. Its rooms occupy two floors of a house immediately opposite the Iturbide Hotel. In its