Its history, population, climate, location,
architecture, soil, water, customs, costumes, horses, cattle,
all attract the stranger's attention, either by force of intrinsic singularity
or of odd juxtapositions. It was a puling infant for a century and a quarter,
yet has grown to a pretty vigorous youth in a quarter of a century;
its inhabitants are so varied that the `go slow' directions over its bridges
are printed in three languages, and the religious services in its churches
held in four; the thermometer, the barometer, the vane,
the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so frequently, so lawlessly,
and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate
is simply indescribable, yet it is a growing resort for consumptives;
it stands with all its gay prosperity just in the edge of a lonesome,
untilled belt of land one hundred and fifty miles wide,
like Mardi Gras on the austere brink of Lent; it has no Sunday laws,
and that day finds its bar-rooms and billiard-saloons
as freely open and as fully attended as its churches;
its buildings, ranging from the Mexican `jacal' to the San Fernando Cathedral,
represent all the progressive stages of man's architectural progress
in edifices of mud, of wood, of stone, of iron, and of sundry combinations
of those materials; its soil is in wet weather an inky-black cement,
but in dry a floury-white powder; it is built along both banks
of two limpid streams, yet it drinks rain water collected in cisterns;
its horses and mules are from Lilliput, while its oxen are from Brobdingnag.
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