The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-08-01

ernor of the city for every person who enters or departs.
 At sp. m. the gates are closed for the night, and no one is allowed to pass un- til they are opened again, after daylight the following morning.
 Having satisfied the officer in charge and passed through the Puerte (Gate) del Ataranza into the old city, you seem to have taken a sudden plunge in to the past to another age and country, and find yourself face to face with re- markable experimentation of beauty and squalor, dirt and venerable antiquity The streets are extremely narrow, coV- cred with hard cement which is dan- gerously broken in many places, and outlined by three-foot sidewalks. few of the streets are partly devoted to shops, but there is no exclusively busi-
 ness portion, except the market space, which is given up to the smallest re- tailers, while the importers and whole ! sale dealers are scattered through the 1 heart of the city You see casas three
 or four centuries old painfully mas l querading in fresh coats of gaudy blue and yellow, like bewigged and bepainted
 octogenarians.
 i Against the massive walls of disman-
 tied convents, once the populous homes of learned and holy men, lean the
 worthless shanties of lazy blacks, their owners summing themselves all day at ease. without a care or trouble in the
 world.
 You find cobblers, tailors, vendors of
 tripe and liver, dealers in every small
 local commodity, occupying what re-
 mains of ancient palaces, now mostly fallen in pieces Of the thirteen or four
 teen thousand inhabitants of the city,
 but a very small portion are pure
 whites, the majority having more or
 less admixture of the African with
 their boasted "bluest blood of Old Cas-
 tile"; and a most despicable cOmmun- ity are many of them, almost too inert
 to breathe. They turk like snakes in
 the corridors of moldy palaces of long
 dead nobles, under the arches of the
 city gates, even in holes ho!lOWed out
 of the walls, coming out an hour or two
 every day to enjoy the sun and beg Of
 passing strangers, crawling bacK to
 their dens at nightfall. Everything re-
 minds you that the Anglo-Saxon asso-
 citations of order, industry, cleanliness
 and conventionality are exchanged for , the dirt and shiftliness of Latln-Afrl-
 can life in the tropics.
 Horsemen, obscured under straw hats
 of such breadth of brim that beside
 them Mexican sombreros would look as pigmies. gallop restlessly through the crowd on their nervous little island pom ies: and if they trample few of the
 fat piccaninies that roll around in the gutters, entirely unencumbered by shred of clothing-nobody cares much there being an embarrassing super fluity of such spawn. Troops ot nall .. grown boys ride through the streets each comfortably clad in single gar
 rnent; fashioned like the cutie sarks : of Tam O'Shanters' witches-their bar
 black legs astride immense straw sad dies on the backs of diminutive don !, keys. Knots of men and women, mostly highly colored and all grinning broadl, and talking at the tops of their voices , obstruct the streets and loiter on tH plazas, apparently with nothing to d' z but take life easy. But everybody il charningly cheerful, polite and com :, municative, evidently taking grea 4 pride in the antiquity and historic as sociations Of their city ready to poin
 out all objects of interest to stranger . and to spin yarns about them tha ' would stagger the marines. For exam
 ple-you may buy of almost any dar v key on the street, for a medic, (si cents), bit of human bone, which h swears by his patron saint came iron the sacred box containing Columbus . remains, which he stole "in the dark ( . the moon" expressly for you.
 The buildings in the heart of the city t especially those in the vicinity C - Cathedral square, bear the war-mark :, of antiquity. They are of lime stone II in the Spanish architecture of the six e teenth century-generally square, tw ' stories high, and with immense room ranged around an unroofed quadrar y gle. The windows are placed hig It from the ground, above the line of wis t" ion of people passing along the street 'l and instead of glass CT shutters, al
 protected in front by iron bars whic ., d bulge toward the bottom like sort ( III basket. As rule, the houses are yer ID plain in external appearance, orns It mented only around the doors and wr HI Ill dows with most ugly designs in stuct |. or chiseling one sees is often .- Spain. But, dispite the accumulate IS of moss and mold with which the slo L. centuries have covered them, it is pla le to see that they were abodes of el y gance in Santo Domingo's palni 'ii days.
 IS FANNIE B. WARD. Id NEW HAVEN GRAYS.