These rooms are as cool and airy as those built after our fashion, though they usually have only one inlet for air and light. They are much higher in ceiling than ours, and are tastefully set off in frescoes. The balustrades are often of brass, and the work has a more finished look, even in common houses, than the best in the States exhibit. On the street side are small balconies for sight-seeing. There are more disagreeable dwellings by far than a first-class Mexican house.
A few rods farther north and we reach the city park, called Alameda. It is a pretty shaded inclosure of about forty acres, lying between the two thoroughfares of the San Francisco and the San Cosme. Its trees are large, thick together, and perpetually green. The leaf hardly falls before the young one presses itself to take its aged place, so that even the deciduous sort never get reduced to a Northern nakedness. Their new spring robes, like a snake's, an eagle's, and an Easter belle's, are assumed or ere their old ones are dropped.
These trees are interspersed with open plats, where flowers of every size and sort gladden the nerves of sight and smell. These are again interspersed with fountains, and circular centres lined with stone benches, and open, hard parterres for children and bands to play. The trees and flowers are shut off from approach by high fences; the circles about the fountains and graveled squares are alone accessible.
This park needs only one addition to make it a perpetual delight—safety. One can not walk there in midday without peril. Almost every day robberies occur. A gentleman walking with his wife saw another man being robbed, and declined to interfere, though he had a revolver, on the ground that it might alarm his wife.
We may rest here from our sidewalk studies, if we are tired, and it is not too dark, and talk on what this city needs to make it as safe as it is lovely.
