In no country in the world may one see such great picturesqueness, variety, and brilliancy of color in the costumes of the masses as then still prevailed in Mexico. Largely of more or less pure Indian blood, come of a race Cortez found habited in feather tunics and head-dresses brilliant as the plumage of parrots, great lovers of flowers, three and a half centuries of contact with civilization had not served to deprive them of any of their fondness for bright colors. Thus with the horsemen in the graceful _traje de chorro_--sombreros and tight fitting soft leather jackets and trousers loaded with gold or silver ornaments, the footmen swaggering in _serapes_ of every color of the rainbow, the women wrapped in more delicately tinted rebosas and crowned with flowers, the winding streets looked like strips of flower garden ambulant. Bucareli seated twenty thousand, and when all standing-room had been filled and the gates closed, thousands of late comers were shut out. The level, sanded ring, the theatre of action, was surrounded by a six-foot solid-planked barrier. Behind and above the barrier rose the benches of the auditorium, the "bleachers" of the populace; they rose to a height of perhaps forty or fifty feet, while above the uppermost line of benches were the private boxes of the _elite_. Within the ring were five heavily planked nooks of refuge, set close to the barrier, behind which a hard pressed _toreador_ might find safety from a charging bull. These refuges were little used, however, except by the underlings, the _capadores_, or by capsized _picadores_; _espadas_ and _banderilleros_ disdained them. On the west of the ring was the box of the _Presidente_ of the _corrida _(in this instance, the Governor of the Federal District); on the east the main gate of the ring through which the _cuadrilla_ entered; on the north the gate of the bull pen. At a bugle call from the _Presidente's_ box, the main gate swung wide and the _cuadrilla_ entered, a band of lithe, slender, clean-shaven men, in slippers, white stockings, knee breeches, and jackets of silk ornamented with silver, each wearing the little queue and black rosette attached thereto that from time immemorial Andalusian _toreadores_ have sported. _El Tigre_ headed the squad, followed by two junior _matadores_, three _banderilleros_, three _capadores_, and two mounted _picadores_, while at the rear of the column came two teams of little, half-wild, prancing, dancing Spanish mules, one team black, the other white, each composed of three mules harnessed abreast as for a chariot race, but dragging behind them nothing but a heavy double tree, to which the dead of the day's fight might be attached and dragged out of the arena.