Vagabond Life in Mexico

GABRIEL FERRY,
FOR SEVEN YEARS RESIDENT IN THAT COUNTRY.
NEW YORK. HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE. 1856.


VAGABOND LIFE IN MEXICO.
The Jamaïca and Mount Parnassus.
Mexico is the most beautiful city ever built by the Spaniards in the New World; and even in Europe it would take a high place for splendor and magnificence. If you wish to behold the magnificent and varied panorama which Mexico presents, you have only to mount at sunset one of the towers of the Cathedral. On whatever side you turn your eye, you see before you the serrated peaks of the Cordilleras, forming a gigantic azure belt of about sixty leagues in circumference. To the south, the two volcanoes which overtop the other peaks of the sierra raise their majestic summits, covered with eternal snow, which, in the evening sun, put on a pale purple hue flecked with delicate ruby. The one, Popocatapetl (smoking mountain), is a perfect cone, dazzling in the blue vault of heaven; the other, Iztaczihuatl (the white woman), has the appearance of a nymph reclining, who lifts her icy shoulders to receive the last beams of the dying sun. At the foot of the two volcanoes gleam two lakes, like mirrors, which reflect the clouds in their waters, and where the wild swan plays its merry gambols. To the west rises an immense pile of building, the palace of 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 inhabitants. 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 interbranching 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.