of indignant heaven; but one of my Indian friends told me privately that the Indians understood the trick, and knew that this lightning went on two legs, and wore a cassock! I would have gone to the spot, and endeavored to have restored the fragments for a sketch, but my guide told me that the natives had carried them off and buried them. While engaged with the stones, we had carelessly, and as usual, let our horses go loose. For the first time, they now took it into their heads to abuse this indulgence, and trotted off. The more we endeavored to coax them back the more vicious they were, and finally dashed off at full speed into the “jicaral,” where they kicked up their heels in great glee. The prospect of a walk back to Leon, with the loss of saddles, pistols, swords, and other et ceteras, if not of the brutes themselves, was little calculated to excite our admiration of these antics. The chase continued half an hour, when we succeeded in securing the horse of our guide; but unfortunately he was the poorest of the whole, and not able to come near the others in a race. Luckily our guide had a lasso, and after another half hour of manœuvring, in which we all got heated and angry, my own horse was secured. He was duly “lathered” for his pains, and was handed over to the guide to pursue the others; being the fleetest, the business was soon done. We took precious good care that they should not get the upper hand of us again that day, and rode them home with a malignant pressure on the terrible Mexican bit, and with no stinted application of the equally terrible Spanish-American spur. Upon our return, the guide conducted us out of our way into a kind of amphitheatre amongst the hills, to what he called the “Capilla de la Piedra,” the Stone Chapel. It was a large rock of conical shape, placed high on the slope facing the entrance to this natural circus, and upon that side had a niche, or hollow, capable of containing four or five persons, and which seemed to have been cut in the rock. I failed to satisfy myself whether it was natural or artificial; but finally concluded, from its position and regularity, that it was a natural opening in the rock, enlarged and modified by art. There were traces of fire, and fragments of broken pottery around it, and immediately in front a large flat stone, which might have been used for an altar. As I looked at it, surrounded by rough, frowning rocks, and shrouded with vines, I fancied it an appropriate niche for an idol, and imagined this natural amphitheatre filled with a superstitious multitude, in blind adoration before it, while the blood of human sacrifices flowed perhaps on the very spot where I now stood.