Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/191

Rh one long to be remembered. May all who attended it be found in that perfect congregation of which this number was the perfect though petite unit: seven, the beginning, a multitude that no man can number, the consummation.

The Town of the Angels is beautiful, and, what is rare in the cities of men, exceedingly clean. It lies foursquare. Its streets are paved in broad blocks, which look as if washed daily, so lustrously they shine in this burning sun. They are wide enough, the streets as well as the pavements; the passion for broad thoroughfares declining as you enter regions where the rays of the sun must be well mixed with shadow to make them endurable.

Most of the streets are raised at the crossings on each side of a narrow channel that runs through their centre under a single broad flat stone, which channel lets the torrents in the rainy season flow to the river without disturbance of travel. It is an improvement on the stone blocks put in the Baltimore crossings for like purposes. The then clean streets are washed by rivulets from Iztaccihuatl, which seems to lie right over our heads, though thirty miles away. How superbly sleeps that snow range above this green meadow and gray town! Were it not too sad a reflection, one might fancy it a body shrouded and laid in state on that high catafalque, ten thousand feet above our eyes.

The straight streets terminate in green groves or brown hills, which look as if they were gates, so close they meet the eye in this bright air. They give a very pleasant effect to the vista that opens to you whichever way you gaze. The streets stretch no little distance before these green and brown gayeties are reached, for there are sixty thousand people in this basin, and these are not packed closely together.

Let us climb the cathedral tower, and take in the whole spectacle. The outlook is both lovely and grand. The city diminishes from this height, but its environs make up for its loss. The fields are better cultivated than those about Mexico, or, rather, are more open and more farm-like, those of the latter being devoted to trees and towns. They are very green and attractive. Irrigation is