s states and
pockets the money may have even that forgiven him in consideration of
roads kept free from robbers, and some attempt at an effectual police.
There is a lesson in this for Mexican rulers.

The Congress professed to be hard at work cleaning out the Augean
stable of laws, rescripts, and proclamations, and making a working
constitution. We went to see them one day, and heard talking going on,
but it all came to nothing. Of one thing we may be quite sure, that if
this unlucky country ever does get set straight, it will not be done by
a Mexican Congress sitting and cackling over it.

On our return from the Real, we spent two days at the house of an
English friend at Tisapan, at the edge of the great Pedrigal, or
lava-field, which lies south of the capital. It was across this
lava-field that a part of the American army marched in '47, and
defeated a division of the Mexican forces encamped at Contrevas. On the
same day the American army attacked the Mexicans who held a strongly
fortified position at Churubusco, some four miles nearer Mexico, and
routed the main army there. They beat them again at Molino del Rey,
carried the hill of Chapultepec by storm, and then entered the city
without meeting with further resistance; though the Mexicans, after
they had formally yielded possession of the city, disgraced themselves
by assassinating stray Americans, stabbing them in the streets, and
lazoing them from the tops of the low mud houses in the suburbs.

An acquaintance of ours in Mexico met some American soldiers, with a
corporal, in the street close to his house, and asked them in.
Presently the corporal sent one of the men off into the next street to
execute some commission; but half an hour elapsed, and the man not
returning, the corporal went out to see what was the matter. He came
back presently, and remarked that some of those cursed Mexicans had
stabbed the man as he was turning the corner of the street, and left
him lying there. "So," said the corporal, "I may as well finish his
brandy and water for him;" he did so accordingly, and the men went home
to their quarters.

The American soldiers were, as one may imagine, a rough lot. Only the
smaller part of them were born Americans, the rest were emigrants from
Europe; to judge by what we heard of them--both in the States and in
Mexico--the very refuse of all the scoundrels in the Republic; but they
were well officered, and rigid discipline was maintained. So
eff