chocolate and a small roll, which desayuno—literally breakfast—you discuss while dressing. Going down into the courtyard, you find your horse waiting for you, and off you go for an hour or two’s ride, and back to a dejeuner-à-la-fourchette somewhere between ten and one o’clock. Then you have seven or eight hours before dinner, so that a good deal of work may be got into a day so divided. Things are managed very differently in country places, but this is the fashion in the capital among the higher class, that is, of course, the class of people who put on dress-coats in the evening.
When we had been a day or two in Mexico, we took our first ride to Tacubaya and Chapultepec. Mexican saddles and bridles were a novelty to us, but when we come to describe our Mexican and his appurtenances it will be time enough to speak of them.
The barricades in the streets constructed during the last revolution of two or three weeks back had not yet been removed, but an opening at one side allowed men and horses to get past. Carriages had to go round, an easy matter in a city built as this is in squares like a chess-board. The barricades mount two guns each, and as the streets are quite straight they can sweep them in both directions, to the whole length of their range. As in Turin, you can look backward and forward along the straight streets from every part of the city, and see mountains at each end. The suburbs of the city are quite as repulsive as our first glimpse of them led us to expect; and, as far as one could judge by the appearance of the half-caste inhabitants, it is not good to go there alone after dark. Here is the end of the aqueduct of Chapultepec, the Salto del Agua; and—crowded round it—a thoroughly characteristic group of women and water-carriers, filling their great earthen jars with water, which they carry about from house to house.