A most mirth-provoking specimen of American character. But we must return to our friend and favourite, Lieutenant Wise, who is truly a Yankee Crichton in a pea-jacket. Besides his nautical skill, and the lingual accomplishments already adverted to, he is a Nimrod in the hunting-field, a Centaur on horseback, a Vestris in the mazes of the dance. Lovers of wild sports in the West will luxuriate in his descriptions of hunting exploits, of his combats with grizzly bears fourteen hundred pounds weight, and his chase of an antelope whose fore-leg he had nearly severed from its shoulder with a rifle bullet, but which still managed to run four leagues, the wounded member "traversing round in its flight like a wheel," before receiving its death-wound. Unable to extract a tithe of the passages that tempt us, we hurry on to his departure for the Mexican capital, whither he was sent early in the month of May, as bearer of a despatch, and in company with a Mexican officer, with whom the lieutenant was at first disposed to be most friendly and sociable, but who forfeited his esteem by the cool proposal of a plan to cheat the government, and whom he soon managed to leave behind--no difficult matter, for the Mexican was cumbered with portmanteau and sumpter mule, whereas the Yankee's sole baggage, as he himself informs us, consisted of two shirts and a toothbrush. Thus lightly equipped, his pace was very rapid; not so much so, however, as to prevent his noting down all that occurred by the way. After La Barca and Ruxton, it is a difficult task to give novelty to an account of Mexican travel and peculiarities. Mr Wise has surmounted the difficulty; and so great is the freshness and originality of his narrative, that we read it with as much zest and enjoyment as if it were the first instead of the twentieth book relating to Mexico which we have perused within the last few years. His anecdotes are most racy and piquant; his sketches of Mexican women, officers, _leperos_, and of his own countrymen in Mexico, are taken from the life with a truthful and vivid pencil. With the class of leperos he had already made acquaintance on the threshold of the country. Turning, one day, into a bowling alley at Mazatlan, with the officers of a British frigate, he gave a fine horse to hold to one of those Mexican mendicants. The fellow's hatred of the _gringos_ was stronger than his love of gain; for no sooner was he left alone than he drew a pistol from the holsters, shot the horse, and ran for his life, which certainly would not have been worth a maravedi had he tarried for the arrival of the enraged lieutenant. "Oh, Mr Smithers!" exclaims the disconsolate mariner thus cruelly dismounted--"Oh, Mr Smithers! you keep a good ten-pin alley, sing a good song, and your wife prepares good chocolate; you are, together, good fellows; but you should never, O Smithers! transform your establishment into a knacker's yard. And you, my