Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/72

70 side with oranges, lemons, figs, and olives; and we wandered about for hours, filling ourselves with fancies faint and sweet as the perfume of faded flowers, and gathered armsful of bloom, until we looked like visitors at a country fair. And we could not help speculating upon the common-sense of a nation, which, having taken the very positive step of expelling religious communities in order to increase the revenues of the State by utilizing their properties, should leave these same properties go to ruin for twenty years, without any further effort to make them available. It is another one of the hieroglyphics of this untranslatable country.

There is no end to pleasant surprises. We wandered into a pleasant corner one day. It was a long, narrow garden, with oleander-bordered paths, and a row of rustic pavilions on one side, holding baths of clear water upon floors of shining marble, into which one descended by a couple of broad steps like those in a Pompeiian picture. The walls were covered with a network of fragrant growing plants; and outside, in the trellised arbors, birds were singing, as if harmony and beauty were the only laws of life. On the other side,