You no sooner put your foot on the stone stairs than your winding way of ascent is beset by innumerable lazzaroni most offensive in habit and appearance, whose rabid importunities for alms will not permit you to say them nay. Once through this crowd of “dago” pauperism—the most squalid and effete of all pauperism, your movements on the causeway are impeded by the boisterous calls of the Borro Querros, with their horses already saddled and bridled for “gentlemin” to ride. The bellowing guttural of one fellow provokes your attention to his steed, in whose praises he is loud, having gotten which, he digs him in flank, and dashes off over the stony pavement, to show you his paces. Your charger selected (I had a weakness in the matter of a fine bay myself,) the din ceases. Our party, consisting of five or six well mounted, determined on a gallop to the “Petite Coral,” calling on the polite and hospitable consul on our way thither. One peculiarity strikes you on starting, that is, that your dago friend, of whom you obtained your charger, acts as a kind of equerry during your ride, and the better to enable him to accompany you, when you are inclined to give your horse the rein, he seizes that animal by the tail with one hand, keeping off the flies with a wisp in the other, or uses it as an accelerator on his haunches, holding on meanwhile with a grip which the Kirk Alloway witches would have envied when they brought about that _finale_ to “poor Maggy.” The streets through which we rode were quite narrow, and enclosed by balconied houses of two stories, or stuccoed garden walls, over which the graceful banana leaf bent, or a cornice of beautiful running flowers was to be seen. From the nearly closed casement pretty dark eyes peeped down upon you, pretty I fear, because scarcely any other features were visible. The native women we met in the street walked closely veiled, which none who met them desired to have done away with, if a truant zephyr once gave a sight of their swarthy faces. Your attention is attracted by the rather picturesque costume of the natives, which consists of a loose shirt drawn at the waist, knee breeches made full, _white_ boots which are regularly chalked, and on the summit of their cranium they wear a cap of cloth bearing an identical resemblance to an apothecary’s glass funnel inverted. The manner in which the peasants retain these head coverings in their place, has been as perplexing to strangers, as how the apple got inside the dumpling was to England’s sovereign, but considering the population, it would not be uncharitable to conclude that the tension is induced by the vacuum in the noddles they surmount, on the principle of the “sucker” with which philosophic juveniles raise a brick. The continued “Boo-ah” resounding in the streets, as the driver of the sleds with casks upon them spurs up the two poor little oxen, whom a small boy leads with a string from the horn, soon convinces you that