GUATEMALA CITY. 
177 
noes higher still, tlieir heads well in the clouds. A city 
of sixty thousand inhabitants, with its houses extending 
six miles north and south, with a population of many 
nations and tribes, — mingling the sixteenth with the 
nineteenth century in many customs and business ways, 
— was not to be seen at a glance, was not to be under¬ 
stood even after a sojourn of a few days. We envied 
the faculty of our English cousins who can come to 
America, spend a few weeks, — even days, — and then 
go home and write with more' knowledge of the places 
they have just glanced at than the inhabitants ever 
possessed. 
As we entered the city we passed at some distance the 
fort of San Jose; and it was significant that the guns 
all pointed towards the city it was supposed to protect. 
Taking no interest in military matters, which I am con¬ 
strained to believe are undesirable if not unnecessary 
relics of a barbarous age, I did not go any nearer to see 
whether, as in the case of San Felipe, the guns were 
more deadly to those within than those outside the fort; 
but the walls looked queer, and we were assured that 
they were of adobe, painted to imitate stone blocks, — a 
kind of Quaker wall. 
Although the Plaza is always the principal focus of a 
Spanish town, no street ever leads directly to it, all lead 
by it, as if accidentally; and so we found ourselves in the 
public square of Guatemala before we had been an hour 
in the city. It was simply a square taken from the tire¬ 
some rectangles of the city; and only on one side had it 
any sufficiently imposing boundaries. The Government 
had suppressed the priestly power; but its monument 
still towered above the very insignificant buildings used 
12 
