Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/71

 standing upon the globe and a serpent's head. The men of the country are very widely imbued with the sceptical spirit of the age, but the women, whose property these objects are, are still devoutly Catholic.

These rooms, in such interiors, though less lofty and impressively finished perhaps than those at Havana, have not the complexity of objects with which we, in an ill-understood passion for decoration, overload our own in the United States. They are large, and contain a few simple articles, with plenty of space around, and have an unmistakable dignity of effect. When we can make up our minds to do that, instead of depending upon a complication of costly rarities in little space, we shall begin to be palatial, and not merely bon bourgeois.

We do not know how republican we are, after all our travelling abroad and reverence for things European, till we come to where the stately old Continental traditions are actually in force.

One of the enthusiasts of the new progressive movement, writing of late of Monterey, a city of 40,000 people, in the north, already connected with us by the Mexican National Railway, and coming into notice as a winter resort, notes, as one of the signs of improvement, that "the old Latin style of building, the square, flat-roofed house, with interior court, is giving place, in the new quarters, to American architecture." To which I reply, Heaven forbid! Let us never "improve" away with "American architecture" the Moorish-looking dwellings which, to lovers of the picturesque, should be one of the principal inducements for visiting the country.