ufferings of
the unfortunate man, doomed to pass the best years of his life among
robbers and assassins. Though every thing that kindness could do to
lighten his sufferings had been done lay his own countrymen, yet the
weary years of imprisonment, superadded to the sudden blasting of his
hopes, had brought premature old age upon him while yet in the prime of
life. But now all was forgotten in anticipation of a to-morrow that he
was never to see. When the attack was made upon the prison, he went to
the door of his cell to learn the cause of so unusual a disturbance,
and was instantly killed--the first victim of the night of the
Acordada.

On that fearful night the Acordada was unusually full of desperadoes,
whom the civil disorders and stagnation of business had driven to
crime. A battle in the night in the streets of a large city is a
fearful thing, at least when cannon are the chief weapons used; but
when there is added to this cause of alarm that the news had spread
through the city that all the murderers and housebreakers in the prison
had been let loose, with arms in their hands, to murder and to ravage
the city, an idea may be formed of the terror of a population who were
cowards by instinct. The contempt with which they had regarded the
lower orders was to be fearfully retaliated. Hate, mingled with
avarice, and inflamed by _pulque_ and bad liquor, was to do its work,
and that, too, without pity. Men, untamed by kindness of those above
them, were now the masters of the lives and property of all, and there
was no remedy. Fear had held the common people in a degraded position,
but they feared no longer. Those who had lorded it over the poor
instead of laboring to elevate their condition, were now to suffer the
consequences of that neglect.

It is a thankless task to labor for the elevation of the degraded, and
oftentimes we are stung with the ingratitude of those whom we have
desired to aid. But God, who has enjoined this unpleasant duty upon us,
has borne our daily ingratitude without casting us off, and we but
imitate him when we continue to minister to the ungrateful, and the
unthankful, and even the unmerciful. The people of Mexico had shown
more liberality, and given more than we. But they had not given it to
educate and to elevate the condition of the poor, but to feed pampered
priests, "who walked in long robes, and who loved salutations in the
markets," and to women like them, who had placed themselves in