nd, except cutting my foot with an oyster-shell, there was
nothing very remarkable in the exploit. At the mouth of this mighty
stream is an island on which stands the town of St. Blas.

The Spaniards, as it is well known, when they discovered America,
christened every cape, bay, mountain, river, island, rock, or shoal
after some saint or other, but the learned are somewhat puzzled to know
who this St. Blas can be. In my poor opinion, the difficulty is easily
enough got over--the word Blas is only a corruption of Blast, and
accordingly we shall find that St. Blast, properly so called, is neither
more nor less than our old friend AEolus, of the heathen mythology,
smuggled into the calendar, who, being the god of blasts and puffs,
might well be canonized under the name of St. Blast, without doing
violence to the tender consciences of the good Catholics. In this way,
according to Dean Swift, Jupiter became Jew Peter, and by a natural
transition, _Saint_ Peter. Whether he is right or not, one thing is
certain, that sundry temples, of which the veritable Jupiter has been
"seized in fee tail," I think lawyers call it, from time immemorial,
have quietly become "St. Peter's churches," to the great edification of
the Christian world, and incredible advancement of religion and piety.

The island, upon which St. Blas is perched, slopes off gradually to the
eastward, but to the south and west descends in a sheer precipice of two
or three hundred feet in height. The town was taken and retaken several
times during the sanguinary war of the Mexican revolution. The last time
it was in the hands of the royalists, they compelled all the male
inhabitants, and, report says, not a few women and children besides,
that they suspected of favoring the Patriot cause, to leap off this
precipice. Soldiers were stationed at the foot of the cliff, to despatch
those who reached the bottom with any signs of life. This piece of
information I had from a widow who kept a shop in the _Plaza_, and who
also told me, "with weeping tears," that her husband was one of the
number who took the fearful leap.

Rather on the north-west side, the hill is surmountable by a zig-zag
path, up which a loaded mule can climb with some difficulty. On the
west, or seaward, side, is a strip of flat land, of considerable width,
on which formerly stood the royal arsenal, rope-walks, and warehouses,
the ruins of which were standing in 1822, when I visited the place. On
the west