Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/121

Rh city, and bound your vision by the purple mountains, whichever direction you gaze. Take any corner where the streets pass clear through the town, you see, north, south, east, and west, or as near that as the lines run, the all-embracing mountains. They are from three to thirty miles distant, some even sixty miles, and yet they look as if only just down to the farther end of this telescopic tube of a street. They rise from two to ten thousand feet, and so are never diminutive, often very magnificent.

No city I have ever seen has any equal cincture. Athens approaches it. Her chief streets look out on Pentelicus and Hymettus; but she is not level herself, and so can not get up these vistas; nor is she large, and does not, therefore, match her mountains. They overpower her, not she them. Mexico is equal to her grander mountains. Popocatepetl is not ashamed to call her sister, nor is she unworthy of such a companionship. Athens historically overtops all its peaks. Mexico in its present proportions well fits her magnificent frame. One never tires of this resting-place for the eye. It is so exquisite in calm and color, that it seems as if made on purpose for exhibition and exhilaration.

This fact, too, seems to put the city in your grasp at the start. Most towns of this size you find it somewhat difficult to master. They are so tossed up and down, or stretched out, or have no perceptible limits, that one is a long time in getting hold of them. Though a dweller in Chicago for a month, it still bewilders me to arrange the streets of its west and south sides. Its north side I never attempted to subdue. I left that for the fire. Boston, every body says, except its own people, is untamable. Even the fire got tired of running round and round its narrow and crooked thoroughfares, and gave up in despair, especially when it drew near its narrowest and crookedest portion. Philadelphia's perfect rectangularity is equally bewildering, while Washington makes the head swim, no less in its everlasting radiations than its political plannings. As for New York, Brooklyn, London, and such like villages, they are all under the same ban as their superior sisters.

The real reason of this is, they have no perceptible boundaries;