perpetrated there up to the time of Cortes' invasion.
Sunday being the Frenchman's day of joyous
recreation all over the world, leave had been
granted, with some liberality, to the crews of
the war ships in port; and from our window we
had seen, during the morning and afternoon,
numerous parties of gallant French Jack-tars—
they are so picturesquely dandified in appearance,
that they more closely resemble patent
blacking than common tar—swaggering along
the strand, peeping under the mantillas of the
women, kissing their hands to tawny old Indian
dames smoking their papelitos in shadowy
doorways, and occasionally singing and skipping,
through mere joyousness of heart and exuberance
of spirits. Many of the men-o'-wars men
were negroes from the Mauritius, and it was
very pleasant to remark that their colour did
not in the least interfere with their being
hail-fellow-well-met with the white seamen. But
you would very rarely see an American and a
black foremast-man arm-in-arm. These fine
fellows of the Imperial French navy had, I hope,
attended service at the cathedral in the morning;
but, as day wore on, they had certainly
patronised the aguardiente shops with great
assiduity; and spirituous intoxication, following,
perhaps, on a surfeit of melons, shaddocks, and
pineapples, in a tropical climate, is not very
good for the health. Touching at St. Thomas's,
once, I said inquiringly to the captain of the
mail steamer, "And this is the white man's
grave, is it?" "No," he answered, "that is,"
and he pointed to a brandy-bottle on the
cabin-table.

I don't think I ever saw so many tipsy tars as
I did that Sunday at Vera Cruz. Portsmouth, with
a squadron just in from a long cruise, was a
temperance hotel compared with this tropical town.
It is difficult to repress a smile when one is
told that Frenchmen never get tipsy. All that I
have seen of French soldiers and sailors on
active service, leads me to the persuasion that
they will drink as much as they can get;
and in their cups they are inexpressibly
mischievous, and not unfrequently very savage.
Yet, although rowdy, insolent, and quarrelsome,
they rarely fall to fisticuffs, as our men do.* On
this particular Sunday they so frightened Vera
Cruz from its propriety—the inhabitants being
mainly an abstemious race, suffering from
chronic lowness of spirits, in consequence of
civil war and the yellow fever—that pickets of
infantry were sent out from the main guard to
pick up inebriated mariners and pack them off
on board ship again. The French are very
quick at adapting themselves to the usages of
the country they visit, and, short as was the
time they had been in Mexico, they had learnt
the use of that wonderfully serviceable
instrument, the lasso. The pickets, wearing only
their side arms, went about lassoing tipsy
sailors right and left, most scientifically; and
after they had caught their men in running
nooses, they "coralled them" that is to say,
they would encircle a whole group of nautical
bacchanalians with a thin cord, which, being
drawn tight, the whole body of revellers would
be drawn close together. Then, the pickets
would, with mild applications of their sheathed
bayonets, astern, run the captives down to the
waterside, and tumble them into the boats
which were to convey them on board their
respective ships.

* You will find, in Algeria, at the military
penitentiaries, "disciplinary battalions," formed almost
entirety of incorrigible drunkards. The excesses
committed by the French in Mexico, and which were
generally induced by libations of aguardiente or
commissariat brandy, were atrocious; in fact, they
bore out, as a rule, the reputation given them by the
Duke of Wellington in his evidence before the Royal
Commission on Military Punishments. See LIBERTY,
EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY, in
Household Words, 1851. Five out of ten soldiers who
massacred the citizens of Paris on the boulevards in
the December of that year, were drunk.

This afternoon's entertainment had continued
for some time; and the last boat-load of topers
having been despatched, Vera Cruz was once
more left to the blazing sunshine, to silence, to
the black scavenger buzzards, and to me. My
hosts were all in their hammocks (slung in the
corridor), enjoying their siesta. I could not
sleep, and bethought me of the long brass
telescope on a tripod in the balcony. I got the lens
adjusted to my sight at last, and made out the
castle of San Juan; the tricoloured flag idly
drooping from the staff on the tower; the shining
black muzzles of the cannon, looking out of the
embrasures of the bastions, like savage,yet sleepy
mastiffs blinking from their kennels; the
sentinel, with a white turban round his shako,
pacing up and down; the bright bayonet on his
rifle throwing off sparkling rays. But beyond
the castle, some two miles distant, there was
nothing to see. Sacrificios and the squadron
were "round the corner," so to speak, and out
of my field of view. The native craft were all
moored in shore; and Vera Cruz is not a place
where you go out pleasure-boating. There was
nothing visible beyond the arid, dusty
fore-shore, but the excruciatingly bright blue sky
and the intolerably bright blue sea: Jove
raining down one canopy of molten gold over the
whole, as though he thought that Danaë was
bathing somewhere in those waters. I fell a
musing over poor Alexander Smith's

All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

The barrenness here was as intense; but it
was from brightness. You looked upon a liquid
desert of Sahara. Ah! what is that? A dark
speck midway between the shore and the
horizon. The tiniest imaginable speck. I shift
the telescope, try again, and again focus my
speck. It grows, it intensifies, it is, with figures
large as life, so it seems, finished with Dutch
minuteness, full of colour, light, and shade,
colour animation, a picture that gross Jan Steen,
that Hogarth, that Callot, might have painted.
A boat crammed full of tipsy sailors. There
is one man who feels very unwell, and who,
grasping his ribs with either hand, grimaces
over the gunwale in a most pitiable manner.
Another is argumentatively drunk, and is