The customs of our ancestors, half Spanish, half indigenous, are disappearing, replaced by a mixture of European practices, and now, in the same house, one prays in the old fashion, clothes one’s self after the French style, and eats after the Italian manner; one mounts his horse or enters his coach _a la_ English, and conducts his business _a la_ Yankee, in order to lose no time. The fountains, those ancient fountains of the colonial epoch, have been replaced by hydrants and troughs at every corner, and the traditional type of the _aguador_ (water-carrier) is eclipsed and forced to betake himself to those sections where the deep shadows of the electric lights fall, and where the precious fluid does not flow of itself, except when it pleases heaven to inundate the streets and alleys. The _china_[10] has died, to live only in the beautiful romances of the popular Fidel; the _chiera_[11] yields her gay and picturesque _puesto_ of refreshing waters, to the experienced _señorita_, who in high-heeled shoes and tightly-laced bodice serves us iced drink in vessels of fine crystal; the _sereno_,[12] with his shining, varnished hat, his ladder on his shoulder and his lantern in his right hand, withdraws shame-faced before the _gendarme_,[13] 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_,[14] 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.