by a couple of drunken natives who were determined to murder the whole family on account of some imaginary grievance. In defending his family and himself he killed one of them, and wounded the other, and next day was cast into prison, where he was kept for almost two years--until his escape--without an opportunity to have his case heard. Meanwhile both his wife and child died of smallpox without being permitted to see him, and were buried without his knowledge. It was reported that after his incarceration his wife and child had moved into a hovel in town, and that when the coffin containing his child's body was borne past the jail on the shoulders of a native, en route to its last resting-place, by a most singular and unhappy coincidence he happened to be peering out through a small hole in the stone wall, and saw the procession. He is said to have remarked to another prisoner that some poor little one had been freed from the sorrows of life. How any white man can survive two years' imprisonment in a Mexican jail is beyond human comprehension; in fact we were informed that it is not intended that one should. I heard it remarked that "if a prisoner has plenty of money it is worth while hearing his case, but if he is poor, what profit is there in trying him?" The judges and lawyers are not likely to go probing around the jails merely for the sake of satisfying their craving for the proper dispensation of justice. We were told by one of the oldest resident Americans that if in the defense of one's own life it becomes necessary here to take the life of another, the safest thing to do is to collect such arms, ammunition and money as may be immediately at hand and make straight through the country for the nearest boundary line, never submitting to detention until the ammunition is exhausted and life is entirely extinct. The filthiness and misery within the walls of a Mexican jail exceed the powers of human tongue to describe, and tardy justice in seeking a man out in one of these Plutonic holes is generally scheduled to arrive a day too late.