ade roses grow out of it, it would be as uninviting as one of the
hills of the valley of Sodom. This hill is now called the "Mountain of
Crosses," for upon it, in 1810, the first insurgent, Hidalgo, the
priest of Dolores, won a battle against the royal troops, which should
have been followed up by an entry into Mexico; but Providence ordered
it otherwise, and the forest of crosses that once covered it proclaimed
a bloody slaughter without any results.

The shores of Tezcuco approach the hill in the wet season, leaving but
a narrow margin for the road, but in the dry season this margin is
greatly enlarged. I have already explained the composition of
_tequisquite_, and the manner of its production; here it was lying in
courses, or spots, as it had been left by the receding and drying up of
the water during the present dry season. Little piles of it had been
gathered up here and there to be taken to town for use, probably by the
bakers or soap-boilers, who are said to pay fourteen shillings an
_aroba_ for it. Besides a little stunted grass, there was here no sign
of vegetable life except a peculiar species of the cactus family, which
resembled a mammoth beet without leaves, but bearing upon its top an
array of vegetable knives that surrounded a most exquisite scarlet
flower.

FATE OF ROBBERS.

There was another sight by the road side more in keeping with the
gloomy thoughts which this desert plain excites: it was the dead bodies
of three men, who had been condemned by a military commission for
robbing a bishop. They were shot, and their bodies were placed on three
gibbets as a warning to others. The bishop said he would have pardoned
the robbery, but when they went to that extreme limit of depravity of
searching within his shirt of sackcloth for concealed doubloons, it was
more than a bishop could endure. The worthy ecclesiastic had renounced
the world and all its vanities, and had put on the badges of poverty
and self-mortification for $50,000 a year, and he wore the disguises
that ought to have shielded him from the suspicion of being rich!

These military commissions are no new invention in Mexico, for that
famous Count de Galvez, the Vice-king who built the castle of
Chapultepec and deposed the Archbishop of Mexico, had a traveling
military court, with chaplain and all spiritual aids, to accompany the
dragoons that scoured the road in search of robbers. When a fellow was
caught, court, chaplains, and dragoons mad