We may here observe, in passing, that handing a flower to a forenoon visitor, who, if a polished gentleman, accompanies his verbal salutation by raising his hand softly to his heart, is only a customary mark of polite attention, quite in character with the complacent manners and natural taste of the Limenian ladies, in this respect favoured by their balmy climate, in which odoriferous fruits and flowers are always within reach: and on leaving their house they almost invariably besprinkle their visitors with perfumes, and thus send them away _redolent_ of hospitality. And while their corridors, in which they frequently swing in their hammocks, or enjoy the _siesta_, are scented with flower-gardens, and their “patios,” or courts, with roses and jessamine, sweet perfumes, and fragrant herbs are frequently used in their principal bed-chamber, when it is found convenient, for the sake of cheering the sick, to receive friends into this apartment, which is usually very gorgeously furnished, and communicates with the drawing-room or _quadra_. Our professional avocations have afforded us an intimate opportunity to know, and we feel a peculiar pleasure in proclaiming it, that it is by the bedside of sickness (where men are exceedingly helpless without the aid of the softer sex, at once more patient and serene, more dexterous and endearing in their assistance,) that the Limeña, be her rank, birth, or pretensions what they may, is seen to greatest advantage. Here the humblest and most faulty of these comforters shows the native goodness of her disposition, and is seen to rise superior to the drawbacks of her education, manifesting the angelic power of her sex to soothe pain and cheer the broken-hearted, by the exercise of that blessed charity which covereth a multitude of sins.
It is curious to notice that among the white women of Lima there are no menials, though they are subject to many of the privations and humiliations of poverty; but, a poor girl of unmixed Spanish blood, though of lowly birth, feels, however destitute in her circumstances, the impulse of what she deems nobility within her; and at nothing do her prejudices more strongly recoil, than at the idea of becoming the wife of a man of African or slave descent.