Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/34

32 place where we could buy roses in bunches as large as one's head for six-and-a-quarter cents.

The plazas were gorgeous with flowers, and on one side street we found a theatre which read us a moral lesson, — a fine edifice of stone, with a great open vestibule sixty feet square as entrance, filled with flower-beds, a fountain in the centre, and domed with glass, into which opened the wide galleries by four separate flights of broad stone steps. Behind every group of eight seats a latticed door gave egress to the gallery on each of the four stories, so that no possible panic could produce more than a momentary result.

Beyond Leon, the mountains, which for some fifty miles had been receding, begin to advance again abruptly. Beautiful with dusky lights and purple shadows, rising majestically into the pure, deep sky, with fertile plains under high cultivation, and groves of magnificent trees, the country has all the elements of great loveliness in its every-day aspect. Soon the hills fall away again, the perfectly flat fields return, and the track begins to wind about the steeply climbing grade which leads to Silao. The organ cactus, a kind of green New-England fence-paling continued upwards to a height