boiler, and "Asa Hodge and Co., Pittsburg,
Pa." embossed on a plate on the "bogey"
frame. Everything in this country which in
mechanical appliances can remind you of
civilisation, comes from the United States. New
York is to Mexico as Paris is to Madrid.

The machine had an Indian stoker, and
uncommonly like a gnome, or a kobold, or some
other variety of the demon kind did that Indian
look, with his coppery skin powdered black with
charcoal dust, and his grimy blanket girt
around him with a fragment of grass-rope.
But the engine-driver was a genuine Yankee—
in a striped jacket and a well-worn black satin
vest—a self-contained man, gaunt, spare,
mahogany-visaged, calm, collected, and
expectoratory, with that wonderful roving Down-East
eye, which always seems to be looking out
for something to patent and make two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars by. But for the
Mexican hat which he had donned, and the
revolver which he wore conspicuously in his
belt, you might have taken him for a law-abiding
manufacturer of patent clothes wringers
or mowing machines, from Hartford or Salem.
He "passed the time of day " to us very
civilly, and confirmed the good news that there
were no guerrilleros on the road. "The French
have fixed up a whole crowd of 'em about
Puebla," he said, "and they don't care about
being hung up by the score, like hams round a
stove pipe. I ain't been shot at for a month,
and I've loaned my Sharp's rifle to a man that's
gone gunning down to the Cameroons."

The long car we had selected was attached
to the locomotive, and a luggage van coupled
to that, in which a fatigue party of French
soldiers who had just marched into the
station placed a quantity of commissariat stores
for the detachment on duty at La Soledad. We
got under weigh, but, the line being single,
were temporarily shunted on to a siding: the
telegraph having announced the coming in of
a train from the interior.

A few minutes afterwards there rumbled
into the station a long string of cars, which,
disgorging their contents, the platform became
thronged with, at least, five hundred men;
stranger arrivals by an excursion train I never
saw. The strangers were mostly tall athletic
fellows, clean limbed, and with torsos like to that
of the Farnese Hercules. Noble specimens of
humanity: and every man of them as black
as the ace of spades. They were in slave-dealers
parlance—now, happily a dead language—
"full grown buck-niggers." They were
uniformly clad, in loose jerkins, vests, and
knicker-bockers of spotless white linen; and their ebony
heads—many of them very noble and commanding
in expression, straight noses and well-chiselled
lips being far from uncommon—were
bound with snowy muslin turbans. These five
hundred men, shod with sandals of untanned
hide, armed with musket and bayonet, and
the short heavy Roman "tuck" or stabbing
sword, and carrying their cartouch boxes
in front of them, formed a battalion of that
noted Nubian force, of whom there were three
regiments altogether, hired from the Viceroy
of Egypt by the French government for service
in Mexico. They had come down from La Soledad
to reinforce the wasting garrison of Vera
Cruz, of which the European portion were
dying of Vomito like sheep of the rot. The
sergeants and corporals were black; but the
commissioned officers were Egyptian Arabs,
sallow, weazened, undersized creatures in braided
surtouts of blue camlet, and red fez caps.
They compared very disadvantageously with the
athletic and symmetrically built negroes.

These Nubians, my friend the gendarme told
me, were good soldiers, so far as fighting went,
but irreclaimable scoundrels. They were
horribly savage, and jabbered some corrupted
dialect with Arabic for its base, but Mumbo
Jumbo for its branches, and which their own
officers could scarcely understand. The system
by which discipline was preserved among them
had been beautifully simplified. If a Nubian
soldier didn't do what he was told, his officer,
for the first offence, fell to kicking him
violently. If he persisted in his disobedience, the
officer drew his sabre, and cut him down.

Think of a Mahomedan pasha letting out
his two thousand pagan negroes to a Roman
Catholic emperor, in order that he might coerce
the Spanish and Red Indian population of an
American republic into recognising the
supremacy of an Austrian archduke!

FAREWELL SERIES OF READINGS.
BY
MR. CHARLES DICKENS.

MESSRS. CHAPPELL AND Co. beg to announce
that, knowing it to be the determination of MR.
DICKENS finally to retire from Public Reading soon
after his return from America, they (as having been
honoured with his confidence on previous occasions)
made proposals to him while he was still in the
United States achieving his recent brilliant successes
there, for a final FAREWELL SERIES OF READINGS in
this country. Their proposals were at once accepted by
MR. DICKENS, in a manner highly gratifying to them.

The Series will commence in the ensuing autumn,
and will comprehend, besides London, some of the
chief towns in England, Ireland, and Scotland.
It is scarcely necessary for MESSRS. CHAPPELL AND
Co. to add that any announcement made in connexion
with these FAREWELL READINGS will be strictly
adhered to, and considered final; and that on no
consideration whatever will MR. DICKENS be induced to
appoint an extra night in any place in which he shall
have been once announced to read for the last time.

All communications to be addressed to MESSRS.
CHAPPELL AND Co., 50, New Bond-street, London, W.

Just published, bound in cloth, price 5s. 6d.,

THE NINETEENTH YOLUME.