stripes of fertility. The land is like a Sahara
diversified by slices from the valley of Kashmir.

The sun was throwing very Iong blue shadows
indeed from the objects which skirted our track,
when we brought up at a straggling structure
of deal boards, palm branches, and galvanised
tinned iron, or zinc sheds, which did duty as the
railway terminus of La Soledad. We found a
number of very hospitable gentlemen waiting to
receive us; the sleepy telegraphic operator at
Vera Cruz having apparently made himself
sufficiently wide awake to notify our coming.
He had done us good service. A cordial welcome
and a good dinner awaited us. Our hosts
were the engineers and surveyors engaged on
the works of the railway; and the engineer
is always well off for commissariat supplies.
He is the only foreigner, the only invader, on
whom the rudest and most superstitious races
look without disfavour; for, from the lord of the
neighbouring manor, to the parish priest — nay,
to the meanest day labourer — everybody has a
dim impression that the bridge, or the aqueduct,
or the railway, will do the country good, and
that every inhabitant of the district will, sooner
or later, " get something out of it."

Our friends of La Soledad were accomplished
gentlemen, full of the traditions of Great
George-street, Westminster; pioneers from the
Far West; rough Lancashire gangers and hard-
handed Cornishmen. They were banded together,
by the responsibilities of a common undertaking,
and by the consciousness of a common danger;
for, until within the last few weeks, every man
had worked with his life in his hand. The
station of La Soledad had been attacked by
banditti, over and over again, and it had
been a common practice with the guerrilleros
to lie in wait in the jungle, and " pot " the
passengers in passing trains. Even now, the little
group were lamenting the loss of their
managing engineer, who had been shot while
riding along an unfinished portion of the line.
"The colonel lasted six days after they'd hit
him," an American overseer of workmen told
me; " and it was a desperate cruel thing, seeing
that he left a wife and three small children;
but he'd had a good time, I guess, the colonel
had. ' Brown,' he ses, turning to me, and clasping
my hand as he lay on the mattress in that
hut over yonder, ' they've done for me at last;
but I reckon I've shot eight of 'em since last
fall." And so he had."

There were two other points in which our
railway friends were cheerfully unanimous.
They all concurred in despising the Mexicans,
and disliking the French. "As for the half-
castes and Spaniards," the American overseer
remarked, "they're right down scallywaggs.
Hanging's too good for 'em; and the only
thing that makes me bear the French, is, that
when they catch a Mexican guerrillcro, they
cowhide him first, and shoot him afterwards, and
hang him up as a climax. As for the Injuns,
they're poor weak-kneed creatures; but there's
no harm in 'em. About a hundred will do the
work of ten stout Irishmen. I used to try
licking of 'em at first, to make 'em spry; but,
bless you! they don't mind licking. They just
lie down on the turf like mules. Well I
recollect how the mayoral of a diligencia makes
his team to go when they're stubborn; he just
gets down and walks behind, and he fills his
pocket with sharp little stones, and every now
and then he shies a stone which hits a mule
behind the ear, and he cries, ' Ha-i-a-youp!' and
the mule he shakes his head, and gallops along
full split. When I see my Indian peons shirking
their work, I just sit on a stone about fifty
yards off, and every minute or so I let one of
'em have a pebble underneath the left ear. The
crittur wriggles like an eel in a pump-log, and
falls a working as though he was going to build
Babel before sundown."

Why the French should have been so intensely
disliked I could not rightly determine. That
the Mexicans should have hated them was
feasible enough; but I rarely found an Englishman
or a German in Mexico who would give
the army of occupation a good word. I have
frequently expressed my opinion that a Frenchman
in a black coat, in light pantaloons, in
straw-coloured kid gloves, in a blouse and
sabots, even, is a most agreeable, friendly,
light-hearted creature; but make his acquaintance
when he is on active service, in a képi
and scarlet pantaloons, and I fear you will
find that a more arrogant, and a more rapacious
swashbuckler does not exist. That is
the character, at least, which the French warrior
has gotten in Mexico, in Algeria, in Germany,
in Italy—his transient spell of popularity in
'59 excepted — and in Spain.

I remember that the ragged assemblage of
maize, and palm-straw, and mud, and wattle huts,
which forms the town of La Soledad lay in the
midst of a broad valley, the sides shelving to a
rocky base, through which ran a shallow river.
I came to this place on the last day of February.
There had been heavy rains a few days
previously, and there was some water, but not much,
in the bed of the river. In the summer, the rivers
of Mexico are as dry as the Paglione at Nice;
and the bridges seem as useless as spurs to
the military gentlemen in garrison at Venice.
There was a detachment of French infantry at La
Soledad, whose cheerful bugles were summoning
the wearers of about two hundred pairs of red
trousers to the evening repast, of which
" ratatouille," a kind of gipsy stew, forms the staple
ingredient. This evening meal is called the
"ordinaire," and is made up of the leavings of
the day's rations, and of such odds and ends of
victual as the soldiers have managed to purchase
or forage. There is no such evening entertainment
in the British army. Our men eat their
clumsily cooked rations in a hurry, and often
pass long hours of hunger between their ill-
arranged meals. The bugle-calls of the French
brought from the shingly shores of the river
numbers of moustached warriors who had been
washing their shirts and gaiters — socks were not
worn by the army of occupation—in the stream.
It was very pretty to watch the red-legged
figures winding along the paths running upward
through the valley, with boards laden with white