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y instinct, I found it convenient to go unarmed. Upon the present occasion, I did not wish to raise a smile of incredulity by protesting that I had never fired a pistol in my life, so I quietly consented to play the part of hero. By displaying my weapon carelessly in my hand when we stopped to take coffee at Saint Martin's, I procured a seat upon the outside, which had been refused me at Puebla. Our escort consisted of a body of six lancers, who, standing at the roadside, saluted us as we passed, and then rode after us at the top of their speed. Poor fellows! they found it hard riding to keep up with the coach. It was some consolation for them to see a man seated on the top of the stage with a Colt's pistol, even if he did not know how to use it, and for once they rode out their beat without getting frightened at their shadows. As the robbers were as great cowards as themselves, whether the man on the box was really a fire-eater or not, it answered the same purpose. These stage-guards are heroes in their way; they always come when the road appears the safest, and never fail to ask for charity, but invariably leave you just as the coach approaches a thicket. A few days ago, this guard caught a fellow on the road whom they believed to be a robber, and hung him with a pocket-handkerchief. REPUBLIC OF TLASCALA. We are now passing the borders of that famous Indian republic, of the high table-land, which shut out despotism by a lofty wall,[16] and was so completely isolated in the times of Montezuma that its people could obtain no foreign products, not even cotton or salt;[17] whose food was the maize which they cultivated, and the game which they caught upon the snow-capped mountains; whose clothing was made from the maguey, and from skins of animals taken in the chase; a people whose government was a council of elders, which was presided over by an hereditary chief; whose political institutions have been the study and admiration of the learned of many lands. That is, in plain English, they were an ordinary tribe of North American savages, obtaining their living, as other Indians did then and do now, by the cultivation of Indian corn and hunting, having the same crude form of government that is common to all the savage tribes of North America. They gloried in their savage notions of independence, and submitted only to the merest shadow of authority. They had not yet reached that point of social organization at whi
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