SPANISH GARDENS 
29 
was simply an unroofed, unfloored part of the home. 
And pavements of shells in fancy mosaic forms kept 
garden walks and courtyards always dry and clean, and 
carried the suggestion of liveableness out-of-doors. 
English money, thrift and energy did much during 
the twenty-one years before the little city again re¬ 
verted to Spain, in 1784; and one writer observes that 
many persons who were there at that time, with whom 
he talked, spake “ highly of the beauty of the gardens, 
the neatness of the houses, and the air of cheerfulness 
and comfort that seemed during that preceding period 
to have been thrown over the town.” 
But all that is another story; and though it is a very 
great debt that the English have put me under for most 
of that which I have been able to learn, through the ac¬ 
counts which they were good enough to render, it is not 
with their flourishing gardens and neat houses that we 
have anything to do. A certain measure of careless 
indifference, in a land where it is always summer and 
flowers—in this “flowery,” fragrant, sunny New Spain 
—a certain disregard, an indolence that is tolerant of 
some disorder, once the planting which assures straight, 
shaded walks, and satisfaction to the love of fruit, is 
done; these are the things which characterized the 
Spanish gardens in the new world—a new world grown 
old enough since they were planted to make them al¬ 
most, if not quite, forgotten. 
