Santa Anna is not so highly estimated in Mexico as in some other parts of the world where people are not so familiar with his eccentric and adventurous career. He was a man of remarkable natural abilities, force of character, energy, and personal courage, but devoid of principle, education, culture, and mindful only of his own interests. He served all political parties in turn. She was his second wife, and was only thirteen years old when he married her, in the fifth term of his presidency, and when he was trying to set himself up as an absolute monarch. For twenty years her life was spent in a camp, surrounded by the whirl of warfare. Her husband was five times President of Mexico, and four times Military Dictator in absolute power. He was banished, recalled, banished again, and finally died, denounced by all as a traitor. She had seen much “glory,” and had received unlimited adulation, but she hardly ever enjoyed one thoroughly peaceful month in her life. It created a sensation in Mexico when the pretty peon girl, Dolores Testa, was suddenly raised from abject poverty to affluence. The Dictator ordered all to address his bride as “Your Highness,” ladies-in-waiting were appointed in order to teach the bewildered little Dolores how to play her rôle in the great world, and then the President organized for her a body-guard of twenty-five military men, who were uniformed in white and gold, and were styled “los Guardias de la Alteza” (her Highness’s Body-guard). When the President’s wife attended the theatre these guards rode in advance of and at the sides of the coach, each bearing a lighted torch. During the performance they remained in the _patio_ or _foyer_ of the theatre, and then escorted her Highness back to the palace in the same order. Such was the power of General Santa Anna in those days that even the clergy bent before him; and when [Illustration: GENERAL GRANT ON A BANANA PLANTATION.] his young wife went to mass, the priests, attended by their acolytes, actually used to leave the cathedral to meet her on the pavement, and with cross and lighted tapers escort her from her carriage to her seat within the church, and at the conclusion of the mass accompanied her to her coach.