The roofs of the dwellings are always perfectly flat, and among the common people are used as barn-yards and henneries. In many cases a cow spends all her days on the roof of her owner’s residence, being taken up when a calf, and taken down at the end of life as fresh beef. In the mean time she is fed on alfalfa, and the slops from the kitchen. Chicken-coops are still more common on the roofs of dwellings, and in the thickly populated portions of the town your neighbors’ cocks waken you at daylight with reminders of St. Peter. Lima is a poor place to sell umbrellas, for along the coast from the northern boundary of Peru, far south-west to the end of the Chilian desert, rain never falls. There is a disagreeable, dismal, sticky, rheumatic dew, however, which is worse than a shower; for during the winter season, beginning in April and ending in October, it penetrates the thickest clothing, and gives one the sensation described by Mantilini as “demnition moist.” The thermometer is pretty regular, however, and ranges from sixty to eighty degrees Fahrenheit during the year, January being the hottest month, and July the coolest. Pulmonary complaints are unknown, but fevers are very common, and the mortality among infants is pitiable. At Callao yellow-fever is usually endemic, and there are three or four deaths every week among the marine population, as the sanitary regulations are not well enforced, and the city is dirty. The chamber occupied by the Peruvian House of Deputies is a long, narrow apartment in what was formerly the University of St. Mark, the oldest institution of learning in America, having been founded in 1551, and confiscated by the Government from the Church in 1869. The spectators sit in a very high, narrow gallery over the heads of the representatives, who are arranged in two rows of chairs, without desks, around the three walls of the chamber, the presiding officer and clerks having the fourth wall at their back. The centre of the room is occupied by a long table, at one end of which sits the presiding officer, who is a priest (with an appearance of having lived on the fat of the land), and at the other end a crucifix is placed, upon which the members of Congress are sworn to support the Constitution. When a formal speech is made, the orator stands upon a platform, with a desk or table before him, and a running debate is participated in by members from their chairs. The Senate Chamber is in the old Inquisition building, just across the Plaza de Bolivar, in which one hundred heretics are said to have been burned to death, and thousands publicly scourged.