There are three types of cabs in Mexico City; the blue, the red, and the yellow. The first charges the unwary voyager a dollar (two shillings) for one and three-quarter miles, for which the red's fee is but half. In cleanliness and comfort there is nothing to choose between the two. The yellow cab is pestilential, as its fluttering quarantine paper flag suggests. It is ramshackle and verminous, and, having earned an ill-name, is dying out, destined soon to be as extinct as the dodo. We hired a red cab, and rattled off through cobbled streets, lined with small shops, broad, well-pavemented but garbage-littered, into the heart of the city. CHAPTER II MEXICO CITY AND THE MEXICANS Mexico city is a combination of Spanish squalor and Paris-cum-New-York civilisation--very lightly veneered over in some places. It is some five miles across, but its business life centres in a square mile. The busiest streets are narrow--such as the Calle San Francisco, which is as narrow as Cheapside and just as full of traffic. Mexico is thoroughly cosmopolitan, and this is particularly noticeable in the matter of trade. Thirty per cent. of the large shops and stores are American, English and French; the greatest trading concerns are run by American capital; railway and steamship offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, land and mining companies, are in the majority of cases staffed and engineered by foreigners. In the main streets typical Spanish buildings have given way to often quite sky-scraping erections of obvious American build--eight or nine-storeyed masses of flats and offices.