Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/181

Rh in full blast. The plaza is large and very beautiful, being surrounded by a handsome iron railing, flanked with tall, heavy-foliaged fresno trees, and paved with little cobbles in a beautiful mosaic, filled with beautiful flowers, and has a very large and elegant fountain in the center. The municipal palace, the handsomest building of the kind, exteriorly, which we had seen in Mexico, and other public buildings, and rows of stores with broad-arched portals, front this plaza. During the feast the broad sidewalk around the plaza is wholly given up to the sale of articles peculiar to the occasion. It is the custom of the country to distribute bon-bons, confectionery made into every conceivable form in imitation of birds, beasts, fishes, men, angels, devils, &c., &c., richly gilded and elaborately ornamented, among all one's friends, and especially among the children. Around the entire plaza was a row of stalls constructed of light matting and cloth, tastefully decorated with colored curtains and flowers, devoted exclusively to the sale of this confectionery and dulces, and attended by women old and young. Beyond the sidewalk was another row of stalls devoted to the sale of wax-candles of all lengths from six inches to six feet for offerings at the church altars.

When evening set in, the crowd which surged around the plaza became so dense that it was almost impossible to pass through it, and when the lamps were lighted, and the military band' played its most inspiring airs, the scene, as we looked down upon it from the balcony of our house, was the most animated and brilliant we had ever seen in Mexico. At about 9½ the common and partly-dressed people began to thin out, and the richer and more pretentious came in to make their