Los Gringos Or, an Inside View of Mexico and California

Seitenzahl:

282

Gewicht:

417 g

Erschienen bei:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Kurzbeschreibung

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of these ambulating establishments are women and children. A fine band discourses delightful music, on alternate evenings, and when one feels disposed to say pretty speeches to pretty damas, moving gracefully around, and enjoy what is in reality a touch of Spanish life, it were as well to saunter an hour on the plaza. Valparaiso is extremely disproportioned in breadth to its great length, necessarily so, from the jutting elevations that hang over it. Immediately back of the heart of the city are a number of these salient spurs, on one of which is planted the Campo Santo ?foreign and native cemeteries?while those to the right have been, by trouble and means of the foreigners, cleared away into small esplanades, having neat and pretty cottages, surrounded by shrubbery?one, the flora pondia, a very beautiful, but diminutive tree, blossoms luxuriantly, with delicate, white flowers, shaped like inverted cones, or bells, and although shedding no odor during the day, yet at night it fairly renders the air oppressive with perfume. These lofty turrets command fine views of bay, shipping, and port, fully repaying the fatigue of getting up, in the absence of dust, dirt and noise. To the left, bordering close upon the harbor, is a long curving promenade, called El almendral?almond grove?for no other reason possibly than that there is not a vestige of trees or verdant leaves to be seen. Away at the southward, in the opposite extremity of the city, on what the sailors designate as the fore and main tops, is another succession of sharply riven ravines, filled and faced with clusters of one storied dwellings, from the summits down to the narrow gorges between It requires some geographical knowledge to explore these regions, and though the toil of clambering about the uneven chasms and numer...

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Mehr von:  Henry Augustus Wise, Cambridge Scholars Publishing