The only people who look cool are the Mexican soldiers in blue and white, and that other Mexican, a civilian, in a broad-brimmed, flimsy hat, spangled with a tinsel braid and fringe. Have these men ever got anything to do? and when they have, do they ever do it? It seems impossible they could undertake any work more arduous than lolling against a post, and smoking a yellow-papered cigarette. Yet only a few days ago these Mexicans, perhaps those very soldiers there, destroyed a tribe of Apaches, and then arrested a force of Arizona Rangers who had pursued the Indians on to Mexican ground! These Apaches had kept the State in a perpetual terror for a long time, but finding the Federal soldiers closing in upon them, they crossed the frontier line close to Tucson, and there fell in with the Mexicans, who must at any rate be given the credit for promptitude and efficiency in all their Indian conflicts. The Apaches were destroyed, and the force of Rangers who had followed them were caught by the Mexican general, and under an old agreement between the two Republics, they were made prisoners of war, disarmed, and told to find their way back two hundred and fifty miles into the States as best and as quickly as they could. Some thirty years ago a Mexican general, who captured some American filibusters in a similar way at the village of Cavorca, paraded his captives and shot them all down. So the Arizona men were glad enough to get away. The cactus country continues, and the plants play the mountebank more audaciously than ever. There is no absurdity they will not commit, even to pretending that they are broken fishing rods, or bundles of riding whips. But the majority stand about in blunt, kerb-stone fashion, as if they thought they were marking out streets and squares for the cotton-tail rabbits that live amongst them. Under the hill on the left is the old mission church of "San'avere" (San Xavier); and over those mountains, the "Whetstones," lies the mining settlement of Tombstone, where the cowboys rejoice to run their race, and the value of life seldom rises to par in the market. Then we enter upon a plain of the mezcal all in full bloom, and a "lodge" of brown men, partly Indian, partly Mexican, waiting it may be for the plant to mature and the time to come round for distilling its fiery liquor. I tasted mezcal at El Paso for the first time in my life, and I think I may venture to say the last, so whether it was good of its kind or not, I cannot tell. I am no judge of mezcal. But I know that it was thick, of a dull sherry colour, with a nasty vegetable smell, and infinitely more fiery than anything I ever tasted before, not excepting the whisky which the natives in parts of Central India brew from rye, the brandy which the Boers of the Transvaal distil from rotten potatoes, or the "tarantula juice" which you are often offered by the hearty miners of Colorado. It is almost literally "fire-water;" but the red pepper, I suppose, has as