The Mexican ladies do not ride any more than their sisters in the United States. Social etiquette prohibits this recreation, unless they have brothers to go with them. The señoras and señoritas take their exercise in closed carriages. You never see a phaeton or wagon in Mexico. When they go shopping they sit in their carriages and have the goods brought out to them. It is a common thing to see a row of carriages before a fashionable store with a clerk at the door of each one exhibiting silks or gloves or ribbons. In some of the stores are parlors in which a señora can sit if she likes and have the goods brought to her. None but foreigners and the common people stand at the counters and buy. Mexican merchants never classify their goods. They have no system in arranging them. Silks and cottons are indiscriminately mixed on the shelves. There is no place for anything, and nothing is ever in place. Hence shopping requires the exercise of a vast deal of patience. I went to buy a pair of gloves one day. The clerk pulled open a drawer in which were shoes, corsets, and ribbons. He found some gloves, but there being none in the box to fit, he hunted around on the shelves and in the drawers until he discovered another lot. Nor are goods ever delivered at the residences of purchasers. If your package is too bulky to carry in your hands or in your carriage it is sent to your house by a licensed carrier, similar to the district messenger boy of New York, to whom you pay a fee. Each carrier has a brass badge like a policeman’s, bearing a number, and if he does not deliver the goods promptly and in good order you report him at police headquarters, where he is heavily fined. On the other hand, if he cannot find your residence, or there is a mistake in the directions, he takes the goods to police headquarters, and you can find them there, and discover the reasons why they were not delivered. On pleasant afternoons--and except in the rainy season all afternoons are pleasant here--everybody who owns a carriage, or is able to hire one, drives on the boulevard which Maximilian made from the city to the Castle of Chapultepec, a distance of two and a half miles. As most of the carriages are closed, the scene is not so interesting as it might be, but you can occasionally catch a glimpse of a beautiful face through the carriage windows. The horses are indifferent. Some of the handsomest equipages are drawn by mules.