Page:Mexico as it was and as it is.djvu/69



You left me retiring to rest at my hotel in Mexico, and soundly did I repose after my last fatiguing ride from the mountains and over the plain to the city. I was roused, however, betimes by the clang of the church bells for early mass. This sound I had not heard since my visit to Italy many years ago, and it brought back to me many pleasant memories, as I lay half awake and half dreaming, during the early hours. When I arose other recollections of Italy were excited. The windows, descending to the ground, of the brick-paved room, thrown open, let in an air worthy of Naples the beautiful! It was the middle of November, but there was a May-mildness in the atmosphere. The sky was of that deep ultra-marine blue peculiar to elevated regions. As I ranged my eye down the street from my balcony, the town was alive with a teeming population; the windows of the houses stood open; fair women strolled homeward from mass; old monks shuffled along in their cowled robes; the butcher urged along his ass with its peripatetic stall hung around with various meats; freshly-leaved flowers and trees stood in the courtyards, of which I caught glimpses through the opened portals; and in the balconies lounged the early risers, enjoying a cigar after their cup of chocolate. It was a lively and beautiful scene, worthy of the pencil of that master painter of cities—Cannnaletti, who would have delighted in the remarkable transparency and purity of the atmosphere through which the distant hills, some twenty miles off, seemed but a barrier at the end of the street!

The plan of the city of Mexico is precisely that of a checquer-board with a greater number of squares. Straight streets cross each other at right-angles and at regular intervals. The houses are painted with gay colors—light blue, fawn, and green, interspersed with a pure white, that remains long unstained in the dry atmosphere.

The view of all these from the elevated tower of the cathedral, (to which I soon repaired after my arrival in the capital,) presents a mass of domes, steeples, and flat-roofed dwellings, frequently covered, like hanging gardens, with flowers and foliage. Beyond the gates, (which you would scarcely think bounded a population of 200,000,) the vast plain stretches out on every side to the mountains, traversed in some places by