Retrospects and Prospects
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217865586
Paperback|9780217865586
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: San Antonio de Bexar t If peculiarities were quills, San Antonio de Bexar would be a rare porcupine, i Over all the round of aspects in which a thoughtful mind may view a city, it bristles with striking idiosyncrasies and bizarre contrasts. Its history, population, climate, location, architecture, soil, water, customs, costumes, horses, cattle, all attract the stranger's attention, either by force of intrinsic singularity or of odd juxtapositions. It was a puling infant for a century and a quarter, yet has grown to a pretty vigorous youth in a quarter of a century; its inhabitants are so varied that the go slow directions over its bridges are printed in three languages, and the religious services in its churches held in four; the thermometer, the barometer, the vane, the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so frequently, so lawlessly, and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate is simply indescribable, yet it is a growing resort for consumptives it stands with all its gay prosperity just in the edge of a lonesome, unfilled belt of land one hundred and fifty miles wide, like Mardi Gras on the austere brink of Lent; it has no Sunday laws, and that day finds its bar-rooms and billiard-saloons as freely open and as fully attended as its churches; its buildings, ranging from the Mexican jacal to the San Fernando Cathedral, represent all the progressive stages of man's architectural progress in edifices of mud, of wood, of stone, of iron, and of sundry combinations of those materials; its soil is in wet weather an inky-black cement, but in dry a floury-white powder; it is built along both banks of two limpid streams, yet it drinks rain-water collected in cisterns; its horses and mules are from Lilliput, while its oxen are from Brobdingnag. ' San Antonio de...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217865586 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217865585 |
| Weight | 0.43 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.29 In |
| List Price | $19.99 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 124 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-09-01 |
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