They were sitting in compact rows on parapets of houses and churches, and seemed specially to affect the cross of the cathedral, where they perched, two on each arm, and some on the top.
When some offal was thrown into the streets, they came down leisurely upon it, one after another; their appearance and deportment reminding us of the undertaker's men in England coming down from the hearse at the public-house door, when the funeral is over.

In all tropical America these birds are the general scavengers, and there is a heavy fine for killing them.[4] Scarcely any one is about in the streets this afternoon, except a gang or two of convicts dragging their heavy chains along, sweeping and mending the streets.

This is a punishment much approved of by the Mexican authorities, as combining terror to evil-doers with advantage to the community.

That it puts all criminals on a level, from murderers down to vagrants, does not seem to be considered as a matter of much consequence.
At the city-gate stands a sentry--the strangest thing I ever saw in the guise of a soldier--a brown Indian of the coast, dressed in some rags that were a uniform once, shoeless, filthy in the extreme, and armed with an amazing old flint-lock.

He is bad enough to look at, in all conscience, and really worse than he looks, for--no doubt--he has been pressed into the service against his will, and hates white men and their ways with all his heart.