Drives there are none at all pleasurable for any extent around the city; nor are the rides more so. The environs, in all directions, are intersected by heavy and high mud walls, shutting out air and vision, leaving only heat and stifling clouds of dust to repay one's trouble.
Lima itself should not be too narrowly criticised from the streets; although without, naught is beheld save dingy, adobie walls, dusty cobwebbed lattices and balconies, half decayed, yet once pass the wide and lofty portals, and many of the best houses have noble suites of apartments, furnished with great taste and even splendor; besides, that which gives, in a certain degree, an air of elegance, is the elaborate mazes of glass doors, gaily papered or frescoed walls, and a profusion of gilding. Light is usually thrown from the roof, and the houses are cool and properly ventilated.
After a few tertulias, and a pretty ball given by the American Chargé, we had no other opportunities of mingling in Liménean society. There were quite a number of pretty women, with very fair complexions and winning manners, who danced like sylphs, as what Creole does not? Two youthful Señoritas, of some sixteen and seventeen years, were pointed out as little lumps of gold, of "purest ray serene," who were fiancée to their uncles, fine old gentlemen of sixty! It was suggestive of a post-chaise and bandboxes to any successful aspirant to the ownership of a lovely pair of eyes. However, these out of the way alliances are quite common in Lima, and perhaps the fair ones, at a later era, begin to discover they have hearts of their own not to be sold to the highest bidder, like bills of exchange at the mart! Very few of these deluded damsels, it may be reasonably presumed, when fully aware of their tender wrongs, can exclaim, in the words of the Spanish lady's ballad:
"I will not falsify my vows for gold nor gain,
Nor yet for all the fondest swains that ever lived in Spain."
CHAPTER LIV.
The public edifices of Lima, which are so closely connected with the History of the Conquest, and the bloody revolutionary struggles of Peru, have no other attributes, either in architectural beauty or position to recommend them.