the “paso llano,” the best of all travelling paces; while, to her no small recommendation, where horse-shoers are not to be found, whether on hard ground or soft, in summer or in winter, she needs not a shoe on her massy and well-rounded hoof. The Sierra curates of a dreary pastoral district, or secluded Indian residence in the wheat-land temperatures, are men, at the age of forty, commonly much worn out in constitution. One of these gentlemen, to whom his home is irksome, is seen to read for weeks together on a stretch, merely to kill time; or he longs for the more refined “tertulia,” to which at one period he was no stranger; or he starts off, swayed by some sudden impulse, to the nearest town of white inhabitants, where he enjoys a finer climate and more gratifying company. He not unfrequently resorts to a mineral “pueblo” (village), under pretext perhaps of selling his “primicia” or first-fruits in grain, &c. which, to be sure, he does to some purpose; for ten to one he will gamble with the extravagant miners, day and night, till the product of the primicia is all swallowed up; and the poor residentiary returns to his cheerless manse involved in a debt which he cannot pay for the next six months, even should his curacy be worth four or five thousand dollars a year, though it oftener happens that the income is much less. In his mountain curacy, wherein he endures sad periods of ennui and long and frequent fasts,[20] that debilitate and break down the best constitution, (for before he can reach a distant church, and say mass, the day is often far advanced,) the curate complains of feeling himself an exile; and is easily led to seek refuge from his self-weariness in various indulgences that far overstep the barriers of self-denial, and plunge him into the outskirts of that moral darkness which he is sent to enlighten. Here, if anywhere on earth, the drawbacks of involuntary celibacy are felt by the priest. For such canonical privations he usually searches compensation in the less amiable society of a favourite “sobrina,” or reputed niece, whose kindness hinges on a precarious friendship, and whose artful complacency “hardens a’ within, And petrifies the feeling!”