strictly temperance principles, who
would like commissions in his corps. I replied, that, so far as
principles were concerned, I could recommend him five hundred
postulants; but that, as regarded practice, most of the young men of my
acquaintance, who had manifested an ambition for a military career,
drank hard.

The which, oddly enough, leads me at last to Mexico.--We had had, on the
whole, rather a hard morning of it. The Don, who was my host in the
_siempre leal y insigne ciudad de Mejico_,--and a most munificent and
hospitable Don he was,--took me out one day in the month of March last
to visit a _hacienda_ or farm which he possessed, called, if I remember
aright, La Escalera. I repeat, we had a hard morning of it. We rose at
six,--and in mountainous Mexico the ground at early morn, even during
summer, is often covered with a frosty rime. I looked out of the window,
and when I saw the leaves of the trees glistening with something which
was _not_ dew, and Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl mantled with eternal
snows in the distance, I shivered. A cup of chocolate, a _tortilla_ or
thin griddle-cake of Indian meal, and a paper cigar, just to break your
fast, and then to horse. To horse! Do you know what it is, being a poor
horseman, to bestride a full-blood, full-bred white Arab, worth ever so
many hundred _pesos de oro_, and, with his flowing mane and tail, and
small, womanly, vixenish head, beautiful to look upon, but which in
temper, like many other beauteous creatures I have known, is an
incarnate fiend? The Arab they gave me had been the property of a French
general. I vehemently suspect that he had been dismissed from the
Imperial army for biting a _chef d'escadron_ through one of his
jackboots, or kicking in three of the ribs of a _marechal des logis_.
That was hard enough, to begin with. Then the streets of Mexico are
execrably paved, and the roads leading out of the city are full of what
in Ireland are termed "curiosities," to wit, holes; and my Arab had a
habit, whenever he met an equine brother, and especially an equine
sister, on the way, of screaming like a possessed Pythoness, and then of
essaying to stand on his hind legs. However, with a Mexican saddle,--out
of which you can scarcely fall, even though you had a mind to it,--and
Mexican stirrups, and a pair of spurs nearly as big as Catharine-wheels,
the Arab and I managed to reach the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe,
five miles out, and thence, over tolerabl