With the permission of my reader I will here step aside, for one moment, from the detail of my ramblings, to say a single word about the geographical and political condition of the country in which I now found myself a denizen, pledging myself, however, to detain the narrative upon nothing which will not be pertinent to and explanatory of the subsequent pages. The peninsula of Yucatan extends over a surface of some eighty thousand square miles, lying in a north-east direction from Laguna de Términos, and jutting out north into the Gulf of Mexico, between the Bay of Campeachy and Honduras. It is about five hundred miles long, and one hundred and sixty broad, and is divided into five departments, eighteen districts, and containing two hundred and thirty-six towns. It is inhabited by something short of half a million of people, the majority of whom are Indians. The country is almost one entire plain, half of which, to the north, consists of a light soil formed upon solid and broken masses of a white lime and flint rock. The other, the southern half, is a deep rich loam, but much affected by the heavy rains of summer, which present serious obstructions to the exertions of the agriculturist. There are no rivers in the interior. The inhabitants are supplied with water from sonatos, or natural wells, which are liberally distributed throughout the country by the formation of supposed subterraneous rivers. Yucatan was formerly a part of the Mexican confederacy, but having recently declared her independence, she has her own President and Congress of legislators, elected by a limited class of qualified electors. Various attempts have been made, by menaces and by offers of negotiation on the part of the Mexicans, to reduce the refractory provincials to their allegiance, but hitherto without success. The deficiency of means, and the distracted condition of the Confederacy at home, have doubtless prevented the Mexicans from qualifying their diplomacy with physical force, which is probably the only kind of logic that will be conclusive.