But these are only the grand outlines of the picture. Turn your eye upon the city, or, rather, look at your feet. In the midst of the chess-board formed by the terraces of houses, and from among the flowers with which these are adorned, you will see rising, as from an immense bouquet, spires, churches with domes of yellow and blue tiling, houses with walls stained with various colors, and balconies hung with a kind of striped cotton, which give them a trim and jaunty appearance. On one of the four sides of the Plaza Mayor (great square) the Cathedral towers majestically aloft. This magnificent edifice overtops the turrets of the president's palace, a building devoid of all pretensions to architectural beauty, and now falling to decay. It is an immense pile, inclosing within its four walls the public offices of the government, a prison, two barracks, a botanic garden, and the legislative chambers. This palace occupies a whole side of the square. The _Ayuntamiento_ (Municipality) and the _Postal de las flores_, an immense market, form the third side. The _Parian_, a market similar to the preceding, completes the fourth. Thus the legislative and executive power, the board of works, commerce--all the departments of the Mexican government, in short, are in one building, and seem as if grouped together under the shadow of the church. The people are there also; for the streets of St. Domingo, of St. Francisco, of Tacuba, of Monnaie, of Monterilla, all arteries of the great city, pour into the Plaza Mayor a flood of human beings, which is always changing, and ever in motion, and you have only to mix in this crowd for a few moments to get acquainted with Mexican life in all its diversified phases of vice and virtue, of splendor and misery.