In order to reach that church of the forbidden mosaic, we had
sweated up several most steep and dusty streets--hot and dusty,
although it was but nine o'clock in the morning. Thence the guide
conducted us into some little dust-powdered gardens, in which the
people make believe to enjoy the verdure, and whence you look over
a great part of the arid, dreary, stony city. There was no smoke,
as in honest London, only dust--dust over the gaunt houses and the
dismal yellow strips of gardens. Many churches were there, and
tall half-baked-looking public edifices, that had a dry,
uncomfortable, earth-quaky look, to my idea. The ground-floors of
the spacious houses by which we passed seemed the coolest and
pleasantest portions of the mansion. They were cellars or
warehouses, for the most part, in which white-jacketed clerks sat
smoking easy cigars. The streets were plastered with placards of a
bull-fight, to take place the next evening (there was no opera that
season); but it was not a real Spanish tauromachy--only a
theatrical combat, as you could see by the picture in which the
horseman was cantering off at three miles an hour, the bull
tripping after him with tips to his gentle horns. Mules
interminable, and almost all excellently sleek and handsome, were
pacing down every street: here and there, but later in the day,
came clattering along a smart rider on a prancing Spanish horse;
and in the afternoon a few families might be seen in the queerest
old-fashioned little carriages, drawn by their jolly mules and
swinging between, or rather before, enormous wheels.

The churches I saw were of the florid periwig architecture--I mean
of that pompous cauliflower kind of ornament which was the fashion
in Louis the Fifteenth's time, at which unlucky period a building
mania seems to have seized upon many of the monarchs of Europe, and