After dinner we look about the town. All is monotonous and sombre. The houses, mostly of one story, form a continuous wall along the street--or along the sidewalk, if there be one--and their projecting, heavily barred windows, in front of which the young fellows have to do their courting, suggest prisons more than homes. Now we come to the massive, crumbling, gloomy church, and wonder where the priest keeps the family which everybody knows he has. Here is the government house, and we stop to picture the wily politicians, who--with noble exceptions--obtain the offices of local grandeur, and the little horde of clerks, many of them rendered prematurely decrepit by their vices, that fawn but cannot be made to work at the nod of authority. In vain we look for a book-store, though somewhere that name doubtless appears on a sign; but we do find the office of the comandante general, an officer who represents the central power, has charge of the military, and often is mining and counter-mining in a sharp struggle with the governor. How intolerably dull it must be to live here! Business of a large sort there is none. The little newspapers are scarcely more than echoes from partisan sheets at Mexico. Religion is a subject that one must let alone, and education a subject that it is useless to discuss. Of science, history, art, nothing is known. The small men in power brook no criticism except from enemies. Affairs in other states, even a famine or a flood, excite little interest. Not much is left except petty intriguing and the gratification of coarse appetites. A revolution is about the only possible escape from this more deadly ennui.[1.8] [LIFE AT MEXICO] Our second day shall be given to the metropolis. The suburbs of Mexico are mostly ragged and unclean, but some broad avenues lined with fine trees run through them, and entering the city by one of these we make our way to the great central plaza. On the eastern side of this extends the palace, a very long two-storied building of little distinction, and on the northern side towers the huge cathedral, quite in the grand, heavy, Spanish style, seamed with earthquake scars and pockmarked by revolutionary bullets. It is a Sunday morning and still rather early, but the plaza is alive. The usual nightly crop of dead and wounded is being carried to the morgue or the hospital. Sick men, cripples and stalwart beggars are beginning to pose for alms. Prisoners in chains are pretending to put the streets in order; but their guards, with that mixture of good nature and indolence that characterizes the Mexican unless his passions are excited, let them do about as they please, and they take their cue for street-cleaning from the Book of Revelation: They that be filthy, let them be filthy still.[1.8]