San Angel, Coyoacan, and Tlalpam, with their clear brooks, their gardens, their fields, and their pretty glades, covered with plants, trees, and interlacing climbers.
In all these places one enjoys the intoxicating freshness of the morning, the attractiveness of the fields, the breathing of the fresh air loaded with the perfume of flowers. There swarms of butterflies, with gleaming and brilliant wings, display their beauties and humming-birds, those precious winged gems which, endowed with an extraordinary flight, cleave the air like an exhalation, or, sucking honey from some flower, suspended in space, incessantly beat their wings and expose the green and pearly lustre of their plumage to the reflections of the sun.
South of the capital, the soil differs from that of the places mentioned. There the camelia, the lily, the Bengal-rose, and the other exquisite flowers of careful cultivation are not met; but there, in the chinampas, those artificial islands which have converted swamps into lovely gardens, grow the luxuriant poppy, the purple pink, the elegant dahlia, the perfumed violet, and the fragrant rose of Castile.
The canal which unites the lakes of Texcoco and Xochimilco in the days of Spring is to be seen covered with canoes loaded with flowers and vegetables bound for the city markets; and everyone, who has participated in the Lenten festivities of the Viga, will ever remember, with delight, the animation that constantly reigns in that place, where the common people finds its greatest joy. It may be said that there is the place of the festival of Spring and flowers.
Summer, in the Valley, as the other seasons of the year, has its especial attractiveness.
The atmospheric strata being unequally expanded by the fierce heat from the earth’s surface, the order or arrangement of the layers in contact with