Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/340

332 curiosity, desiring to ascertain how many flowers composed one of the huge bouquets offered for sale, I bought one. The man asked four reales (fifty cents); I gave him two, and gave a boy three cents to carry it to my room. In the privacy of that apartment I dissected that bouquet, as an anatomist would take to pieces the human frame, to find out what composed it. There were thirty red roses, fifty white ones, twenty-eight violets, thirty heliotropes, twenty white rosebuds and thirty pink ones, the whole forming a solid pyramid of flowers, capped by three red roses, one metre twenty centimetres in circumference and twenty centimetres high. There were one hundred and ninety-one flowers, besides the trimming of leaves at the base and an ornamented holder of fancifully cut paper. I leave to my readers to calculate what this would cost in New York, at the time I bought it, on the 8th day of May; but for those hundred and ninety-one flowers I paid only the sum of twenty-five cents!

Flowers bloom here all the year round, one crop following and intermingling with the other; but, as in the North, May and June are the months for roses. From the high plains of Tlascala to the border of the sea may be traced the blossoming of the beautiful that pervades all nature, whether the country be traversed in January or June, in August or December.

One wonders, as he sees the vast floral display, whence all these flowers are obtained, and it is only by seeking the outskirts of the city and the canal of Chalco that he will be gratified. Taking the horse-cars at the Plaza for the paseo of La Viga, one reaches a bridge spanning a canal, one of the few water-ways that yet exist in this city. The famous "floating gardens" are always just beyond the eye, floating a little farther on; if one is at the Viga bridge, they are down the canal at Santa Anita; at the latter place, they are at Xochimilco; and there one will hear of them as at Lake Chalco. But there are "floating gardens" near the canal, only they do not float, never did float, and never will float. One arrives at La Viga, and is at once pounced upon by a set of gondoliers almost as ravenous as Hell Gate pilots. They surround one and call his attention to their gondolas, said gondolas being what people of the North