Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/51

Rh considerably larger. It has one principal street running back from the shore a single block. A horse railway passes down this Cade Centrale once a half hour or so, and for a real, or twelve and a half cents, takes you the near a mile that street extends. But it takes no one, as all who have money have no desire to leave the block or two about the plaza; and all who are obliged to go from centre to circumference have no money. So the Spanish Yankee fails of success in this enterprise.

One street runs parallel with the Centrale the entire length of the city, and two shorter ones fill out the arc that the rear wall makes. Eight or ten cross these at right angles. That is all of the True Cross, viewed geographically. Numerically, it has fifteen thousand inhabitants, of whom over one thousand are foreigners, and only about five thousand can read or write. The Indian population predominates in numbers, and the Spanish in wealth and influence, though the Mexican is a conglomerate of both, and each in its separate or blended state is without social degradation or distinction.

Its chief street has two arcades, with little markets and tables for brandy or coffee sippers. It has a score or two of stores, some with quaint names, such as "El Pobre Diabolo" (The Poor Devil), over a neat dry-goods house, whose merchant thereby humbly confesses he does not make over "one per shent" on every two. Another has B. B. B. as his initials: "Bueno, Bonito, Barato" (good, pretty, cheap).

The streets are narrow, as they should be in hot countries. Tiny rivulets trickle down their centres, and disinfectants in the sickly season nightly cleanse these open sewers.

Another and a more important source of its cleanliness is the buzzard. I had been taught to detest the buzzard, perhaps because it was black. I had heard how unclean a thing it was, and was exceedingly prejudiced against it. But I find, to my surprise, that here this despised and detested creature is the sacred bird, almost. It darkens the air with its flocks, roosts on the roofs, towers, steeple-tops, everywhere. A fine of five dollars is levied