Pacific Shores from Panama Volume 37 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 Excerpt: ...We returned to the plaza, where a military concert was now in full swing. If the women had presented a sober picture at the cathedral in the morning, not so now at this afternoon promenade. Decked in their smartest gowns and escorted by gay young officers and obsequious young men, they sauntered in groups of three or four round and round the glazedtile walks among the flowers and palmettoes. We went with two friends (one of them the American minister at La Paz) to the zarzuela that evening. A fairly good company was playing an old favourite, the melodramatic "Mancha que limpia," and a good house was in attendance. The scene was certainly characteristic of a Latin play-house, the main floor occupied for the most part by the men, the three tiers of boxes filled with elaborately dressed women, and the peanut-galleries crowded to suffocation with the small trades-people. The town reserves a number of picturesque corners for him who will ferret them out. There is the market; there are the old palaces and churches ornamented with those extravagant plateresque carvings done by the Indians under the guidance of their Spanish conquerors; there is the great stone bridge that spans the Chili, with its massive piers and buttresses that remind you of their prototypes at Toledo; there are the long street vistas, with Chachani or Misti ever framed at the far extremity. And in the evening you may drive out over the rough country road to a bit of American soil--the observatory that Harvard University maintains here for the study of the southern heavens--and see the stars sit for their portraits taken by its wonderful photographic telescopes. It is strange, indeed, to find this astronomer's home, so absolutely American in all its appointments, perched on the far fl...