their terms, which, though high, he agreed to at once, without cavil. They said it would take us eight days to reach the part of the sierra described in the letter, and that we might have to wait on the summit several days more, before the weather would afford a clear view. They would be ready in two days; they had just returned across the mountains from San Antonia de Guista, and needed rest and repairs. There was a frankness and simplicity about these fine fellows which would bear the severest scrutiny, and we could only admit the bare possibility of our being mistaken. "It took us three days, however, to procure a full supply of the proper kind of provisions for a fortnight's abode in the sky, and on the fourth, (May 5th,) we paid our formal respects to the Cura, and started for the ascent--he not forgetting to remind us of the promise to report to him the precise geographical locality of our discovery." The journal is again blank until May 9th, when the writer says, "Our altitude, by barometer, this morning, is over 6000 feet above the valley which we crossed three days ago; the view of it and its surrounding mountains, sublime with chasms, yet grotesque in outline, and all heavily gilded with the setting sun, is one of the most oppressively gorgeous I ever beheld. The guides inform us that we have but 3000 feet more to ascend, and point to the gigantic pinnacle before us, at the apparent distance of seven or eight leagues; but that, before we can reach it, we have to descend and ascend an immense barranca, (ravine,) nearly a thousand feet deep from our present level, and of so difficult a passage that it will cost us several days. The side of the mountain towards the north-west, is perfectly flat and perpendicular for more than half its entire height, as if the prodigious section had been riven down by the sword of the San Miguel, and hurled with his foot among the struggling multitude of summits below. So far, the old Padre is accurate in every particular." In a note opposite this extract, written perpendicularly on the margin of the manuscript, the writer says, "The average breadth of the plain on this ridge of the sierra, (that is the ridge on which they were then encamped for the night,) is nearly half a mile, and exhibits before us a fine rolling track as far as we can see. Neither birds, beasts, nor insects--I would there were no such barranca!" On the tenth he says, "on the brink of the abyss--the heaviest crags we can hurl down, return no sound from the bottom."