Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/105

Rh trained. All is dark and silent save the ghastly pictures on the roof of the dome, which are silent but not dark. We slide down the smooth sides of that chancel roof, scamper along on the broad-backed ridge of the nave; that is, they do, not I; alas! for this proof of a vanished childhood, and get ourselves upon our own roof, which is attached to that of the hotel, and into our own rooms. Our bird's-eye view, though viewed like all such views of real birds, stays, like theirs, undescribed.

The easel is set up again at the same spot. It is morning now. The sun is up these two hours, and pours a strong flood of warmth and light on this page. The noise of the street carts comes muffled up to this house-top. The morning trumpet-clang and drum-beat of the soldiers mingle with them, and rise above them, clear and steady, a sign that this government is more military yet than civil. Frequent bells put in their heavy musical notes, sometimes rapid; there is one now striking the half-seconds, sometimes slower, but all alike calling a heedless city to an almost voiceless service.

The birds send up their pretty chatterings among the bells, the trumpets, and the rattling carts, those true babes in the wood, and babes in nature, whose very songs are the laugh of childhood threading the graver tones of maturer nature. How deliciously their treble laugh breaks on the ear! Do you not wish you could hear them, poor ice-bound citizens of the Arctic North?

This is a royal place to see this royal city. Never had a town such grand environment. Athens has mountains and sea, but scanty plains. Rome, plains, but no water, and low-browed hills. Jerusalem, mountains, but no plains nor sea. Modern cities are without the least trace of scenic loveliness. London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, and Berlin, how cheap their panorama! It is a map and not a picture that one draws when he paints these capitals. Boston and Baltimore make a slight approach to hill effects, but only a hundred feet high are their mountains, and no plains to set off even these.

Look here; turn your eye (and body too, or you will leave your