Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/81

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ANACHRONISMS
79

difference on the mind that even familiar objects put on an unusual expression. You see French bonnets and dresses as unmistakably Parisian as if Felix's monogram were embroidered on the side panel; but the olive cheeks, flashing eyes, and slender figures they adorn change the well-known costumes as if they were disguises at a masquerade. You see gentlemen in the ugly attire which fickle fashion has made the exponent of modern civilization; but they look as unlike matter-of-fact English or business-built Americans as the water-carrier in his leather harness, or the mozo in zarape and sandals. Is that a commonplace horse-car dashing around the sharp corner yonder, with two mules on a jingling gallop, swarthy Indian women smoking at the windows, and a conductor blowing his tin fish-horn like a madman? What is the time-annihilating telephone doing in the corner of this drowsy courtyard under the gray quiet of arches that shadow the unbroken rest of centuries, in this land of procrastination and delay? And of all conceivable anachronisms, what brings a nineteenth-century steam-roller into these fifteenth-century streets, where the paving-stones are still brought in from