But here's the plaza, and your first glimpse of Mexican life. It is dusty and frowsy enough--this stone-paved square with its tawdry green and yellow-painted houses, its ill-laid roads broken by crevasses and large holes under the flimsy tram lines where cobble stones have got displaced; but there is just touch enough of the tropics to make it fascinating. At its centre is a two-storeyed kiosk--bandstand above, drinking-booth below. Under the deep shade of giant laurels, evergreen oaks, tulip trees, palms and orange trees, stands an inner ring of chairs and round tables; the outer circle is formed of iron garden-seats backing on to the flower-beds, rich with scarlet-blossomed poinsettia, twenty or thirty feet high, with yellow and purple bell-flower blooms, with scarlet tulipans and a pale pink and white blossom of a jasmine-like shape and size. Overhead in the thick leaves myriads of _piches_--bright-eyed, sleek-feathered cousins of the English blackbird--chatter, chatter, chatter till you wonder if they will ever stop: the Veracruzian tells you they never do. On three sides of the plaza the houses are arcaded; on the fourth is a hideously meretricious pile of yellowish stone--the cathedral. It is but 10 a.m., yet the sun is so fierce that the arcades are curtained off with sunblinds reaching to the pavement edge. Within these tunnels of stifling shade, Vera Cruz breakfasts at ten and dines at five, and drinks all day. Tables for two, tables for four or more, tables of metal or of wood, stained with ringed stains of wineglass or coffee-cup are ranged up by the blinds, leaving a passage for strollers. All day, almost all night at these tables sit men--men of all conditions. It is the kaleidoscope of the quays, a shade higher and ... lower. For the filthy, sweating nigger at the hatch-side catches something--however little--of the majesty of toil. But these men, they neither toil nor spin. They have come in from plantations where they are almost kings, and they hold their glasses in fever-yellowed hands, and leer at the passing women and girls, whose coarse beauty shrouded in mantilla, whose plump powdered necks, and bosoms heaving opulent under tawdry muslin frocks seem fitting part, the female complement to the drink-sodden scene. But stay! there is a pleasanter sight, at that table over there. It's worth a glance--you are glad to look away from the wolfish-eyed victims of drink and debauchery at those two hearty English skippers, tanned and bearded, who take their liquor like men, and talk of their just completed "runs." They are in the place but not of it, and somehow you think you catch an envious glance thrown their way by the gaunt, blear-eyed creature who crawls past them after his fifth cocktail.