Let us behold this pleasing city from afar before examining more in detail the institutions and habitations of its people. The environs of the capital form a good setting to its beauty. Taking our stand on the range of hills which bound the Valley of Mexico, our eyes rest upon the cultivated fields and gardens of the smaller towns which dot the plain and lead up to the central mass. Green meadows, running streams, great plantation of _maguey_, giving their characteristic semi-tropical aspect to the landscape, surround _haciendas_ and villages embowered in luxuriant foliage, all lying beneath the azure vault of the Mexican sky. The gleam of domes and towers, softened in the glamour of the distance, catches our eyes; and the reposeful atmosphere and mediaeval tints seem to belie the strife of its past, or even the incidents of its modern industrial life. There is the Castle of Chapultepec surrounded by trees, the beautiful and venerable _ahuahuetes_, or cypresses, surmounting its hill--the Aztec "Hill of the Grasshoppers" where Montezuma's palace was, and where stands the fine structure reared by the viceroys, now the official residence of the Presidents of Mexico of to-day. And there lies Guadalupe gleaming in the sun, with its famous shrine of miraculous visions and cures--the Lourdes of Mexico. There lie Tacubaya, San Angel, and Tlalpam, luxurious and aristocratic suburban homes of Mexico's wealthy citizens, surrounded by their exuberant vegetation on fertile hillsides mid soft and soothing colour and balmy atmosphere. From the pine-clad hills whereon we stand, which form the rim of this singular valley, the whole panorama is open to the view, of lakes and flat plain, the latter crossed by the dusty roads cut by centuries of traffic through the white _adobe_ soil, giving access to the surrounding villages and the serried lines of the _maguey_ plantations, or the chess-board chequers of dark green _alfalfa_, lighter barley, and yellow _maiz_. And from plain and dusty road, and vivid _hacienda_ and city domes and whitened walls, our gaze rises to the clear-cut, snowy crest of "The Sleeping Woman," Ixtaccihuatl, in her gleaming porcelain sheen, where she hoards the treasures of the snow, reminding us of the peaks of the great South American Cordillera, to whose system she and her consort Popocatepetl are but a more recent addition. Like legendary sentinels of a vanished past, they seem to overwatch the valley.