back my draft to me, I think we have the business closed up; please ship the goods as soon as possible.” The check was endorsed back, and the two old friends went out arm-in-arm. To his disgust the storekeeper found next day that No. 1 had been to the bank with the draft, which the bank had cashed on the storekeeper’s endorsement. They also show some humour in their thefts. A Mexican lawyer who lived near me in the French colony had some friends to his house one evening, who sat out with him on the porch. They went in to supper, and when they returned found all the chairs had been stolen. The lawyer decided not to call in the police but to catch the robbers himself, so after his guests were gone he brought out some more chairs and then hid in the shrubbery with a gun. There he sat till 3 A.M., when he made up his mind that they would not come again, so he went into the house to put away the gun. When he returned to bring in the chairs the rest of them were gone also. How the thieves must have enjoyed watching him as he watched for them, and then stealing his chairs from under his nose! The town has hardly got over laughing about it yet. As we did not have very much success with the police protection afforded us by the government during our first year’s work, we asked permission to have two or three police turned over to us, whom we would pay. The government refused, but said we could put on any of our own men and buy them uniforms and clubs, and that then the government would give them authority as regular police. So the second year we put two of our own men in uniform, and I picked out two of the cheekiest young cubs we had. One day a young man of the _gente fine_ (smart set) started to walk across some fresh-laid pavement, which had not yet cooled and set, when the policeman interfered and requested him not to cross. The young fellow gave him a withering glance and started forward again; the policeman again interfered with the same result. When he started the third time the policeman grabbed him by the coat tails and pulled him back. This took the dude by surprise; he tripped over the curb and sat down rather forcibly on the sidewalk. I was standing about one hundred feet away, and ran forward as soon as I saw that there would be trouble. I reached them just as the dude was unmercifully hammering my policeman, who did not dare to retaliate. I grabbed him by the wrist and gave it a twist (the old schoolboy trick), and soon had him marching along. He struggled furiously, and in a few minutes we had a crowd of about one thousand people around us, and I was glad to see three city policemen coming up on the run, to whom I turned him over. He spent the rest of the day in the lock-up, and, the story going round, we had very little more trouble with this class. On one or two occasions we had trouble with the police themselves trying to cross our work. On the first occasion a mounted officer started to ride across some fresh concrete in