Our house was in the street of the Flamingo. Like most of the houses in Merida, it was built of stone, and had one story; the front was about thirty feet and had a sala covering the whole, about twenty feet in depth. The ceiling was perhaps eighteen feet high, and the walls had wooden knobs for fastening hammocks. Behind the sala was a broad corridor, opening on a courtyard, at one side of which was a sleeping-room, and at the back of that a comeder or eating-room. The floors were all of hard cement. The courtyard was about thirty feet square, with high stone walls, and a well in the centre. Next, running across the lot, was a kitchen, with a sleeping-room for servants, and back of that another courtyard, forty feet deep, with stone walls fifteen feet high; and in order that my inquiring fellow-citizens may form some idea of the comparative value of real estate in Merida and New-York, I mention that the rent was four dollars per month, which for three persons we did not consider extravagant. We had our own travelling beds, the table, washhand-basin, and chairs set up, and before breakfast our house was furnished. In the mean time the fiesta of San Cristoval was going on. Grand mass was over, and the next ceremony in order was a _corrida de toros_ or bull-fight, to commence at ten o'clock. The Plaza de Toros, or, in English, the bull-ring, was in the square of the church of San Cristoval. The enclosure or place for spectators occupied nearly the whole of the square, a strange and very original structure, which in its principles would astonish a European architect. It was a gigantic circular scaffold, perhaps fifteen hundred feet in circumference, capable of containing four or five thousand persons, erected and held together without the use of a single nail, being made of rude poles, just as they were cut in the woods, and tied together with withes. The interior was enclosed by long poles, crossing and interlacing each other, leaving only an opening for the door, and was divided in like manner by poles into boxes. The whole formed a gigantic frame of rustic lattice-work, admirably adapted for that hot climate, as it admitted a free circulation of air. The top was covered with an arbour made of the leaves of the American palm. The whole structure was simple and curious. Every Indian could assist in building it, and when the fiesta was over it could be torn down, and the materials used for firewood.