closeness of the day. No wonder that Mr. Bullock, the Mexican traveller, as he sat in his room here in the hot season, heard the church-bells tolling for the dead from morning to night without intermission; for weeks and weeks, one can hardly even look into the street without seeing a funeral.
We turned back through the city, and walked along watching the Zopilotes—great turkey-buzzards—with their bald heads and foul dingy-black plumage. They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top. When some offal was thrown into the streets, they came down leisurely upon it, one after another; their appearance and deportment reminding us of the undertaker’s men in England coming down from the hearse at the public-house door, when the funeral is over. In all tropical America these birds are the general scavengers, and there is a heavy fine for killing them.3
Scarcely any one is about in the streets this afternoon, except a gang or two of convicts dragging their heavy chains along,