tables or
rattling their tethers against the mangers, listening now to the English
grooms as they whistled the familiar airs of home while they rubbed
their charges down, and now to the sleepy, plaintive drone of the Indian
servants loitering over their work in the kitchens. Then I wandered back
again,--from drawing-room to dining-room, from bedchamber to boudoir.
And at last I found that I had crossed a bridge over another court-yard,
and gotten into another house, abutting on another street. The Don was
still lord here, and I was free to ramble. More drawing-rooms, more
bedchambers, more boudoirs, a chapel, and at last a library. Libraries
are not plentiful in Mexico. Here, on many shelves, was a goodly store
of standard literature in many languages. Here was Prescott's History of
the Conquest, translated into choice Castilian, and Senor Ramirez his
comments thereupon. Here was Don Lucas Alaman his History of Mexico,
and works by Jesuit fathers innumerable. How ever did they get printed?
Who ever bought, who ever read, those cloudy tomes in dog Latin? Here
was Lord Kingsborough's vast work on Mexican Antiquities,--the work his
Lordship is reported to have ruined himself in producing; and Macaulay,
and Dickens, and Washington Irving, and the British Essayists, and the
Waverley Novels, and Shakspeare, and Soyer's Cookery, and one little
book of mine own writing: a very well-chosen library indeed.

What have we here? A fat, comely, gilt-lettered volume, bound in red
morocco, and that might, externally, have passed for my grandmother's
edition of Dr. Doddridge's Sermons. As I live, 't is a work illustrated
by George Cruikshank,--a work hitherto unknown to me, albeit I fancied
myself rich, even to millionnairism, in Cruikshankiana. It is a rare
book, a precious book, a book that is not in the British Museum, a book
for which collectors would gladly give more doubloons than I lost at
_monte_ last night; for here the most moral people play _monte_. It is
_un costumbre del pais_,--a custom of the country; and, woe is me! I
lost a pile 'twixt midnight and cock-crow.

"Life in Paris; or the Rambles, Sprees, and Amours of Dick Wildfire,
Squire Jenkins, and Captain O'Shuffleton, with the Whimsical Adventures
of the Halibut Family, and Other Eccentric Characters in the French
Metropolis. Embellished with Twenty-One Comic Vignettes and Twenty-One
Colored Engravings of Scenes from Real Life, by George Cruikshank.
London: Printed fo