fortunes
until 1815, when he, too, was taken and shot.

The man to whom Moreles owed his downfall was Augustin de Yturbide, a
royalist leader, who pursued the insurgents with relentless energy. Yet it
was to this man that Mexico in the end owed its independence. After the
death of Moreles a chief named Guerrero kept up the war for liberty, and
against him Yturbide was sent in 1820. As it proved, the royalist had
changed his views, and after some fighting with Guerrero he joined hands
with him and came out openly as a patriot leader. He had under him a
well-disciplined army, and advanced from success to success till the final
viceroy found himself forced to acknowledge the independence of Mexico.

The events that followed--how Mexico was organized into an empire, with
Yturbide as emperor under the title of Augustin I., and how a new
revolution made it a republic and Yturbide was shot as a traitor--belong to
that later history of the Spanish American republics in which revolution
and counter-revolution continued almost annual events.

PAEZ, THE LLANERO CHIEF, AND THE WAR FOR FREEDOM.

On the 3d of June, 1819, General Morillo, the commander of the Spanish
forces in Venezuela, found himself threatened in his camp by a party of
one hundred and fifty daring horsemen, who had swum the Orinoco and
galloped like centaurs upon his line. Eight hundred of the Spanish
cavalry, with two small field-pieces, sallied out to meet their
assailants, who slowly retired before their superior numbers. In this way
the royalists were drawn on to a place called Las Queseras del Medio,
where a battalion of infantry had been placed in ambush near the river.
Here, suddenly ceasing their retreat, and dividing up into groups of
twenty, the patriot horsemen turned on the Spaniards and assailed them on
all sides, driving them back under the fire of the infantry, by whom they
were fearfully cut down. Then they recrossed the river with two killed and
a few wounded, while the plain was strewn with the bodies of their foes.

This anecdote may serve to introduce to our readers Joseph Antonio Paez,
the leader of the band of patriot horsemen, and one of the most daring and
striking figures among the liberators of South America. Born of Indian
parents of low extraction, and quite illiterate, Paez proved himself so
daring as a soldier that he became in time general-in-chief of the armies
of Venezuela and the neighboring republics, and was Bolivar'