t came to get their share of the
mammoth cargo. The king's officers came to look after the royal
revenue; and caravans of mules were summoned to transport the Spanish
portion of the freight to Vera Cruz. Thus, for a short time, the
population of this village was swollen, from 4000 to 9000, which fell
off again when the galleon took her departure.

[Illustration: ACAPULCO.]

Such was the commercial condition of the town of Acapulco down to the
time of the independence. From this time it was lost to commerce, until
it was made a half-way house on the voyage to California. The town lies
upon the narrow intervale between the hills and the harbor. It is built
of the frailest material, and is destroyed about once in ten years by
an earthquake.

The castle of San Diego stands upon the high bank, and, though
commanding the entrance to the harbor, is itself commanded by the
surrounding high lands, and has so often been taken by assault during
the last thirty years as to be considered untenable. The harbor appears
like a nest scooped out of the mountains, into and out of which the
tide ebbs and flows through a double channel riven by an earthquake in
the solid rock. Tradition says it once had another entrance, but that
an earthquake closed it up and opened the present channel. There is
still another opening in the sharp mountain ridge that incloses it from
the sea, but this opening, dug by the labor of man, at a point opposite
the entrance of the harbor, was to let the cool sea-breeze in upon one
of the hottest and most unhealthy places upon the continent. Such, in
substance, is and was the little city of Acapulco, the seat and focus
of the Oriental commerce of New Spain and of all the Spanish empire.

WAR OF SANTA ANNA AND ALVAREZ.

Santa Anna and Alvarez are the only remaining insurrectionary chiefs in
Mexico. When I was last in the capital, Santa Anna was reigning supreme
in the vice-royal palace, and Alvarez was supreme at Iztla, the capital
of the Department of Guerrero, of which Acapulco is the sea-port town.
The two chiefs had been long hostile to each other, but a gold mine,
discovered upon the bank of the River Mescala, was "the straw that
broke the camel's back." Alvarez had not been consulted in the
disposition made of it. Santa Anna felt himself powerful in his
newly-equipped army of 23,000 men, the finest army that had ever been
seen in Mexico--an army which he was maintaining at a daily cost of
$23,000. Alva