The lady-teacher's face changed;--one would have said she was frightened or troubled. She looked at the girl doubtfully, as if she might hear the master's question and its answer. But the girl did not look up;--she was winding a gold chain about her wrist, and then uncoiling it, as if in a kind of reverie. Miss Darley drew close to the master and placed her hand so as to hide her lips. "Don't look at her as if we were talking about her," she whispered softly;--"that is Elsie Venner." MEXICO. A certain immortal fool, who had, like most admitted fools, great wisdom, once said, that the number of truces between the Christians and Saracens in Palestine made an old man of him; for he had known three of them, so that he must be at least one hundred and fifty years old. The saying occurs in a romance, to be sure, but one which is not half so romantic as the best-accredited decade of Titus Livius, and is quite as authentic as most of what Sir Archibald Alison says, when he writes on the United States. What Palestine and the Crusades were to the witty son of Witless, Mexico and her politics are to moderns, not even excepting the predestined devourers of the Aztec land, who ought to know something of the country they purpose bringing within the full light of civilization through the aid of slaughter and slavery. There are some myriads of "Americans of the North" yet living, and who entertain not the remotest idea of dying, who remember Mexico as a Spanish dependency quite as submissive to Viceroy Iturrigaray as Cuba is now to Captain-General Serrano; and who have seen her both an Empire and a Republic, and the theatre of more revolutions than England has known since the days of the Octarchy. The mere thought of the changes that have occurred there bewilders the mind; and the inhabitants of orderly countries, whether that order be the consequence of despotism or of constitutionalism, wonder that society should continue to exist in a country where government appears to be unknown.