The Acordada gave its name to that night insurrection to which I have so often referred. Two regiments of artillery, quartered in the palace of the Inquisition, _pronounced_ against the legality of the election of Pedraza to the presidency. One night they took possession of the Acordada, where they were joined by the whole body of desperadoes there confined. Among the persons at that time detained in this prison, and on that night wantonly killed, was an Englishman, who had been kept in prison for several years, charged with the singular offense of having married the daughter of an ex-marquis. There had been romance in his courtship and romance in his marriage, but it had not met with the approbation of the father, who unfortunately had influence enough to get the newly-married man into prison, and to keep him there. At last the father had relented, and on the next day the poor Englishman was to have been set at liberty. Long and trying had been the sufferings of the unfortunate man, doomed to pass the best years of his life among robbers and assassins. Though every thing that kindness could do to lighten his sufferings had been done lay his own countrymen, yet the weary years of imprisonment, superadded to the sudden blasting of his hopes, had brought premature old age upon him while yet in the prime of life. But now all was forgotten in anticipation of a to-morrow that he was never to see. When the attack was made upon the prison, he went to the door of his cell to learn the cause of so unusual a disturbance, and was instantly killed--the first victim of the night of the Acordada. On that fearful night the Acordada was unusually full of desperadoes, whom the civil disorders and stagnation of business had driven to crime. A battle in the night in the streets of a large city is a fearful thing, at least when cannon are the chief weapons used; but when there is added to this cause of alarm that the news had spread through the city that all the murderers and housebreakers in the prison had been let loose, with arms in their hands, to murder and to ravage the city, an idea may be formed of the terror of a population who were cowards by instinct. The contempt with which they had regarded the lower orders was to be fearfully retaliated. Hate, mingled with avarice, and inflamed by _pulque_ and bad liquor, was to do its work, and that, too, without pity. Men, untamed by kindness of those above them, were now the masters of the lives and property of all, and there was no remedy. Fear had held the common people in a degraded position, but they feared no longer. Those who had lorded it over the poor instead of laboring to elevate their condition, were now to suffer the consequences of that neglect.