The _élite_ of the Spanish population pride themselves on their gardens--flower-beds in the inclosed court-yards; flower-beds raised some three or four feet from the ground and walled around with stones--but if the flowers that grow on these elevations are "few and far between," they make up in color and fragrance what they lack in numbers. The court-yard is usually flagged, like the best room in the house, and the whole is kept cool and fresh by continual sprinkling and irrigating. This, however, is correct only of a very few houses; the average Mexican, even though his family consist of twenty head, lives in a single dark _adobe_ room, without window or fireplace--the hard, dry, yellow clay within a continuation of the hard, dry, yellow clay without--not divided even by a jealous door. In summer, the family live inside the house, rolling around on the bare floor, or the straw matting spread in one corner--careful not to venture into the sun that bakes the barren ground by their _casa_ harder and harder every day. In winter, the day is passed on the outside, the different members of the family shifting their position with the sun--huddling together, flat on the ground, with their backs against the wall that is warmest from its rays. What they do for a living, I don't know: could they harvest nectar and ambrosia, instead of wine and bread, from the land surrounding their miserable houses, they could not be induced to till it; and, as for trade or handicraft, they have never flourished in Tucson. The only thing that swarthy, black-eyed lad there will ever learn, is to lasso his starved _bronco_, or shoulder his lockless gun, and start out with the pack-train, just loading for Sonora, in front of the largest store in town. If he returns from there without losing his scalp, he will never rest till the last _paso_ has been spent with his _compadres_, at the _baila_, or the new American bar and billiard saloon at the corner. Nor will he begrudge his sister, or any other lass to whom he is attached, the many-colored shawl in the show-window of the American dry-goods store at the other corner; and, should anything be left then, he will conscientiously devote it toward promoting the bull-fight that is to come off next Sunday. "Miserable people, a miserable place, and a miserable life!" came from between the set, white teeth of a little personage at the window of a house lying on something of an eminence, in the "fashionable" quarter of the town, as she absently gazed on the fields, bright and alive with the stir and the sun of this pleasant July afternoon.