hand, withdraws shame-faced before the gendarme,4 and thus with other types, whom the curious investigator now encounters only in the pictures of forgotten books.
Who now remembers the habits of the humble friars, who once traveled through the streets amid the respectful salutations of the faithful?
The coaches slung on straps, the gigs, the omnibuses—are all passing away, all are forgotten in the noisy whirl of English and American carriages and the confusion of the tranvias,5 which rapidly slip over their steel rails.
Mexico changes, principally, in its material part. The old houses fall daily, façades change, the ancient wooden roofs give way to iron sheeting.
The streets are being lengthened, their names are expressed in cabalistic signs, and their historic and traditional associations are relegated to the verses of our poets.
The city, born amid the rubbish of the heroic Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the viceroyalty of New Spain, which had on every corner a chapel or temple—or, at least, a picture of a saint—pious evidences of the religion of the populace, now rejuvenates itself, appropriating those old buildings, consecrated to some special purpose, to some use far different, since the epoch of the Reform.
What was then a church is now a library; what was a convent, a barrack; what was a customs house, a departmental office; a corridor becomes a gallery; a patio, a warehouse; a refectory, a stable.
Before the special physiognomy of those times completely disappears, before the crowbar demolishes the last façades, before the scaffolding is raised against the bulging wall, before—finally—we hear the song or whistle of the indifferent stonecutter, as he mercilessly chisels the stone