Page:Vagabond life in Mexico.djvu/8

6 Chapultepec, once the abode of the old viceroys of New Spain. Round the mountain on which it is built stretches, in a long, waving belt of verdure, a forest of cedars more than a thousand years old. A fountain bubbles forth at the top of the mountain; its brawling waters leap down into the valley, where they are received into an aqueduct, and thus conducted into a large and populous city, to supply the wants of its in habitants. Villages, steeples, and cupolas rise on all sides from the bottom of the valley. Dusty roads cross and recross one another like gold stripes on a green ground, or like runnels of water inter branching through the country. A tree, peculiar to Peru, the weeping willow of the sandy plains, bends its long, interlaced branches, loaded with odoriferous leaves and red berries, in the evening breeze, and a solitary palm-tree rises here and there above clumps of olives with their pale-green foliage.

But these are only the grand outlines of the picture. Turn your eye upon the city, or, rather, look at your feet. In the midst of the chess-board formed by the terraces of houses, and from among the flowers with which these are adorned, you will see rising, as from an immense bouquet, spires, churches with domes of yellow and blue tiling, houses with walls stained with various colors, and balconies hung with a kind of striped cotton, which give them a trim and jaunty appearance. On one of the four sides of the Plaza Mayor (great square) the Cathedral towers majestically aloft. This magnificent edifice overtops the turrets of the president's palace, a building devoid of all pretensions to architectural beauty, and now falling to decay. It is an immense pile, inclosing within its four walls the public offices of the government, a prison, two