that each and every one of those reputed harmless beverages would enter into his _Index Expurgatorius_. "Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop [of alcohol] to drink." 'Tis thus he would quote Coleridge. He is as furious against tobacco as ever was King James in his "Counterblast." He is of the mind of the old divine, that "he who plays with the Devil's rattles will soon learn to draw his sword." In his pious rage against intemperance, and with a view to the instruction of the rising generation, he has even published teetotal versions of "Cinderella" and "Jack the Giant-Killer,"--a proceeding which Charles Dickens indignantly reprobated in an article in "Household Words," called "Frauds upon the Fairies." Nearly the last time I met George Cruikshank in London was at a dinner given in honor of Washington's birthday. He had just been gazetted captain of his rifle company, and was good enough to ask me if I knew any genteel young men, of strictly temperance principles, who would like commissions in his corps. I replied, that, so far as principles were concerned, I could recommend him five hundred postulants; but that, as regarded practice, most of the young men of my acquaintance, who had manifested an ambition for a military career, drank hard. The which, oddly enough, leads me at last to Mexico.--We had had, on the whole, rather a hard morning of it. The Don, who was my host in the _siempre leal y insigne ciudad de Mejico_,--and a most munificent and hospitable Don he was,--took me out one day in the month of March last to visit a _hacienda_ or farm which he possessed, called, if I remember aright, La Escalera. I repeat, we had a hard morning of it. We rose at six,--and in mountainous Mexico the ground at early morn, even during summer, is often covered with a frosty rime. I looked out of the window, and when I saw the leaves of the trees glistening with something which was _not_ dew, and Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl mantled with eternal snows in the distance, I shivered. A cup of chocolate, a _tortilla_ or thin griddle-cake of Indian meal, and a paper cigar, just to break your fast, and then to horse. To horse! Do you know what it is, being a poor horseman, to bestride a full-blood, full-bred white Arab, worth ever so many hundred _pesos de oro_, and, with his flowing mane and tail, and small, womanly, vixenish head, beautiful to look upon, but which in temper, like many other beauteous creatures I have known, is an incarnate fiend? The Arab they gave me had been the property of a French general. I vehemently suspect that he had been dismissed from the Imperial army for biting a _chef d'escadron_ through one of his jackboots, or kicking in three of the ribs of a _marechal des logis_. That was hard enough, to begin with. Then the streets of Mexico are execrably paved, and the roads leading out of the city are full of what in Ireland are termed "curiosities," to wit, holes; and my Arab had a