But if it were not for these Mexicans--that delicate strain of the fine old Spanish blood that still runs in her veins--San Antonio would have lost much of her naïve charm many years ago. The touch of the old grandees is everywhere laid upon the city. In the narrow streets, the architecture of the solid stone structures that crowd in upon them in a tremendously neighborly fashion shows the touch of the Spaniard in every corner; it appears again and again--in the iron traceries of some high-sprung fence or second-story balcony rail, or perhaps in the lineaments of some snug little church, half hidden in a quiet place. The Cathedral of San Fernando, standing there in the Main Plaza, looks as if it might have been stolen from the old city of Mexico and moved bodily north without ever having even disturbed its fortress-like walls or the crude frescoes of its sanctuary. The four missions out along the Concepcion road are direct fruit of Spanish days--and remember that each of the little squares of San Antonio is a plaza, so dear to the heart of a Latin when he comes to build a real city. But the impress of those troublous years when Spain, far-seeing and in her golden age, was dreaming of Texas as a mighty principality, is not alone in the wood and the stone of San Antonio, not even in the delirious riot of narrow streets and little squares. The impress of a Latin nation still not three hundred miles distant, is in the bronzed faces of the Mexicans who fill her streets. Some of them are the old men who sit emotionless hours in the hot sun in the narrow highways, and vend their unspeakable sweets, or who come to affluence perhaps and maintain the marketing of _tamales_ and _chile con carne_ at one of the many little outdoor stands that line the business streets of San Antonio, and make it possible for a stranger to eat a full-course dinner, if he will, without passing indoors. These are the Mexicans of San Antonio who are most in evidence--the men still affecting in careless grandeur their steeple-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, even if the rest of their clothing remain in the docile humility of blue jeans; the women scorning such humility and running to the brilliancy of red and yellow velvets, although of late years the glories of the American-made hat have begun to tell sadly upon the preëminence of the mantilla. These are the Mexicans who dominate the streets of the older part of the town--they are something more than dominant factors in the West end of the city, long ago known as the Chihuahua quarter.