Perrysburg Journal

In spite of its flat surface and its rectilinear streets, the City of Mexico is very picturesque and attractive; indeed I do not know of a city which presents a more brilliant aspect of life and color. The architecture is massive and clumsy, and when studied in detail furnishes little to gratify the taste or provoke the curiosity, but when taken as a whole it furnishes a picture which pleases by its variety and strangeness. The air here is so clear and pure that the stars shine with an unnatural brilliancy, and this purity of the atmosphere heightens the effect of the vivid colors and varied outlines of the buildings. The sky line is broken by shrines and turrets and pinnacles, elaborately carved and decorated, which rise above the parapets of the houses, and the wall line is diversified by a succession of moldings and projections, and by the inevitable balcony before the window and the awning of linen or canvas which tells of a Southern climate. Very few of the buildings impress us, because stucco is almost universal, and the stone looks very much like stucco, being uneven in surface, and not taking a smooth polish. But Mexican houses are built, not for the street on which they turn their backs, but for the open courts on which all the rooms open, which are the centers of Mexican household life and which are embellished and decorated with new forms of comfort and luxury. As we pass by a porte cochere, which may have on one side a meat-shop and on the other a notion store, we look into a court yard with two or three stories of elaborate colonnade around it, with rare plants and flowers blooming in vases of porcelain, and broad flights of stone steps leading up to the open galleries, and we have a higher respect for the domestic life of the Mexicans.

The streets uniformly present a busy and active scene, partly on account of the natural tendency to out-door life in a warm climate, partly because of the waste of energy resulting from their rude appliances of labor. All transportation is done by hand or on pack-mules. The dray, the cart, the furniture wagon, the express, the delivery wagon, are unknown here-their services being wastefully replaced by burros and Aztecs. The burro is quite an institution here, and will be until the interior gets better roads. A wagon road is the exception in Mexico, and the country has no third choice between the railroad and the mule track, and it is astonishing how many things are carried in paniers and bags and skins across the spinal column of the diminutive but hardy burro. Lime and sand and stone, charcoal and wood and hay, fruit and vegetables and milk, minerals, chemicals, in a word, all the natural products of the country are dexterously adjusted on the packs, and as it takes about twelve of the little beasts to get away with as much as a stout horse could draw in a wagon, there is a great appearance of activity, quite out of proportion to the result accomplished. The city slop-cart is simply a pair of boxes slung across a pack-saddle, and the Mexican butcher-boy has a small gallows of iron fixed on his donkey's back, from which he hangs the carcasses and quarters of the very diminutive mutton, the exiguous veal and the discouraged beef of the country. The donkeys, however, have the easy end of the contract; they only carry the light loads, and as soon as anything gets too heavy for a donkey it falls to the weary back of the porter and is carried by one-man power.

Two other circumstances which lend life to the streets are the prevalence of street hawkers and the fashion of boarding away from home. Cafes, restaurants, tendas, fondas, pulquerias, dulcerias and pastelerias abound, and the Mexicans do a great deal of out-door eating. In the poorest quarters open-air frying-pans hiss and sizzle with unsavory messes of sausage, garlic, fish, tortillas and other indelicacies of the perennial season. Ices are sold in the plaza and on the streets, cheap and not bad, and it is a sight for a sketch in Punch to see a flabby old Indian beldame who has lived on this terraqueous globe seventy-nine years without ever washing her face or combing her hair, squatting on the curbstone and eating from a small glass a three-cent water ice and smoking a cigarette. My eyes have seen this sight only too often.

Then the Mexicans have a sweet tooth, and between the constant thirst of this dessiccated climate and the constant longing for sugar-plums the trade in sweets is a roaring one. Fruit stands abound with fruit venders circulating between; then all the fruits of the country are candied-and very fine candies they make; then they are made into a sweet paste and into an infinite variety of confections alluring to the taste but provocative of thirst, and as wine is exorbitantly high, the Mexican drinks sugar-water, sherbets, lemonade, water-ices, seltzer and various pink and yellow compounds suggestive of the revels of the Marchioness in the kitchen of Mr. Sampson Brass.

In addition to out-door eating, street life is enlivened by out-door trades. The taxes on shopkeeping, like all other taxes here, are very arbitrary, a dealer who carries $100,000 of stock and sells $1,000,000 worth a year, paying very little more than the smallest shopkeeper. These taxes are made much higher than for street venders, and the consequence is that hundreds of industries that would go into small shops under an equitable rate of taxation are driven into the streets. All these hawkers and peddlers, carrying their stock in trade on their heads and crying out their wares or displaying them on the sidewalks and in the plazas, help to fill the moving panorama, which constantly changes, yet always remains the same. Moreover the climate is enervating and persuades the better classes to take to carriages; the Mexican is also much given to riding up and down on horseback; the army is kept parading, and drilling and relieving guard in an impressive manner; the gendarmes, in dark blue uniforms and white havelocks, are at every corner; swarms of Indian laborers, in flapping white canvas suits and flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, flit noiselessly by in their bare feet, and nothing is wanting to complete the picture but the sound of music and laughter, which are here almost unknown, and the presence of lovely woman, who is not given to appearing on the streets.-Cor. St. Louis Globe-Democrat.