Bazaine was incited to catch both thieves
and thief-catchers, and hang or shoot them
all impartially. Deprive the people of their
arms, the French could not. The rancheros,
or farmers, pleaded that without guns,
swords, and lances, they could not hold
their "haciendas," and that, in order to
carry on their agricultural pursuits, their
sons, stock-koepers, and labourers, must
all be armed. Hence the crowd of cavaliers,
mounted and unmounted, in Puebla, with
daggers and pistols stuck in their girdles.

When we had brushed from our garments
a few of the innumerable layers of
dust which had been accumulating there
for the best part of a week, we proceeded
to take a walk about the City of the
Angels. The canonigo had his breviary
to say, and we left him reciting it in his
bedroom at the hotel, smoking his cigar
meanwhile. I thought it strange, when
we descended into the streets, that the
angelic chorus should be "Rataplan, plan,
plan, plan!"—an incessant and most
intolerable drumming. But it was not the
Poblana who drummed. Not so much as
a tambourine was banged by the Poblana.
They twang a little on the guitar, and
dance prettily enough to that wiry music;
but this melancholy race, in their fiestas
even, are sad: the Indians, save when they
get tipsy on "pulque," always appear to be
musing on the decadence of the Aztec race,
and to be preoccupied by internal visions of
Montezuma's ghost; while the half-castes
are perpetually absorbed in schemes for
robbing the stage-coach and cutting the throats
of capitalists; and the whole-castes, or pure
white Spaniards, dwell with moody affection
on the good old days of the viceroys
and the monks, and brood over the
memory of Cortes. Mexico is a country in
which every man seems to have something
on his mind; and the shadow of La Noche
Triste—I have a piece of the bark of the
tree against which the conquistador set his
back on that fearful night when all the
causeways ran with blood—yet hangs over
the land.

The rataplans came from the French.
They had only recently taken the city by
storm. They had a strong garrison in
Puebla, and seemed determined to make
their presence felt, by continuous
reverberations of sheepskin. Shade of old John
Ziska—did he not, when dying, order that
his skin might be tanned to cover a drum
withal, that his foes might be frighted after
his departure? What a. din the French
drums made in Puebla's streets! Parties
of drummers seemed to be marching up
and down every one of its thoroughfares;
and in one of the Plazas there was an entire
French military band, with a big drum,
and a side-drum, and an indefinite number
of little drums, discoursing martial music,
which was actually deafening. The
performance of a military band is, however,
to me invariably a delight. It is amicable
and social: it is humanising, and softening,
and civilising. It pleases the children;
it mollifies the mob; and, especially,
it brings out the pretty girls. They always
dress in their best, and look their nicest, to
hear the warlike music play. Even the
Italian ladies at Milan, in the days of the
Austrian occupation of Lombardy, could
not resist the evening mazurkas and
schottisches. It was only in Venice that they
kept away in obstinate sulkiness from the
drums and trombones of the Tedeschi. Now,
here in Puebla, the red-legged warriors of
Napoleon the Third were quite as cordially
hated as ever had been the white-coated
warriors of Francis Joseph in Lombardo-
Venetia. The French had bombarded
Puebla mercilessly; and the first phases of
their occupation subsequent to the
surrender had been a very close imitation of a
sack. The Poblanas had made a fierce
attack; the majority of their number were
known to be Spanish to the core; already
was the expected Maximilian as a dog from
the north the Poblanan notions of
geography being somewhat hazy. Still they
could not resist the French military bands
in the Plaza; and in the evening not only
were they to be seen there, but Mexican
ladies and Mexican dandies in the most
elaborate toilettes of the newest Paris
fashion.

In this same Plaza—of which, perhaps,
the area is as vast as that of Russell-square,
London—there were some two thousand
quiet and subdued listeners to the invaders'
music, of that race which makes up the
vast bulk of the Mexican people, the
Red Indian; "red," inasmuch as the hue
of the Mexican aborigines, as compared
with the complexion of the Indians of the
more northern portions of the American
continent, is as that of a bright copper
kettle by the side of a cake of chocolate.
They have just a tinge of European blood
in them; the late General Almonte had
about a tenth; and Don Benito Juarez,
the actual President of the Republic, an
even smaller admixture of Spanish race:
so small indeed that he is sometimes
in disparagement termed "El Indio." The