the Indian quarter of the city, crossing swamps,
plantations, and waste lands to Xochimilco, the "Field of Flowers."
Along this canal ply daily primitive canoes and punts laden with
vegetables, flowers, and other produce for the native market. The
floating gardens, or _chinampas_, far-famed of Mexico, are encountered
upon this canal. But, alas! the "floating gardens" do not float, nor is
it possible to prove that they ever did, in plain, prosaic fact. They
consist of areas of spongy soil intersected by numerous irrigation
ditches, where the traveller may observe the Indian owners industrially
watering them and tending their profuse array of flowers and
vegetables. New "floating gardens" are sometimes made by the method of
driving stakes into the shallow bottom of the lake, winding rushes
about them and filling in with the fertile mud.

The city itself is surrounded on all sides, except that leading to
Chapultepec, by miles of squalid streets, where dwell the poor and
outcast of the community--and their name is legion. Yet these
surroundings, if squalid, are less painful than the frightful East End
dens of London, or the appalling Bowery and east side of New York.
American cities, whether North or South, have produced nothing in their
boasted march towards "liberty," which is an alleviation for the
proletariat, above the cities of Europe. These mean yet picturesque
streets give place as we enter to those inhabited by the better class,
whose dwellings generally exist side by side and interspersed with the
shops and commercial establishments, after the general fashion of
Spanish-American cities. This is indeed a notable feature of their
regimen. Here is the old home of a former viceroy or of a modern
grandee, cheek by jowl with a little bread or liquor shop; its handsome
doorway, worthy of study, but a few paces away from the humble entrance
of the _tienda_ aforesaid. The names of some of Mexico's streets and
squares are reminiscent of the past or of fanciful story and legend and
heroic incident. Here is the _puente de_ Alvarado, formerly the
Teolticalli, or Toltec canal; here the street of the _Indio triste_, or
that of the _Nino perdido_; the "sad Indian" and the "lost child"
respectively. Redolent of the Mexico of the viceroys, of political
intrigue, of love and _liasons_, of the cloak and the dagger, are some
of the old streets, balconies, and portals of Mexico. Here the Spanish
cavalier, with sword and muffling cape,