One of those zealots, a Rev. Mr. Stephens, after a nine months’ journey through several towns, found his way to Ahualulco, where, relying on the countenance of the government officials, he commenced a series of bitter assaults on Catholicity. A popular tumult was the result, during which the unfortunate man was killed, March 2, 1874. When news of this cruel, though not unprovoked, murder reached Mr. Foster, he waited on the Mexican minister, who informed him that “the principal assassins and two priests had been arrested, and that a judge had been despatched to the district with an extra corps of clerks to ensure a speedy investigation and trial.” This promise was faithfully and promptly kept, as we find by a despatch dated April 15, in which the minister says: “Up to the present date seven of the guilty parties have been tried and condemned to death, from which sentence they have appealed to the supreme court. Twelve or fifteen more persons charged with complicity in the crime are under arrest awaiting trial, including the _cura_ of the parish of Ahualulco.” Yet this summary vengeance, nor even the indignity offered to the venerable _cura_, who had had no participation whatever in the disturbance, did not satisfy the insatiable soul of Mr. Foster. From his subsequent letter to Lafragua, and several despatches to our government, we infer that the condign punishment of the priest, innocent or guilty, was to him the most desirable of objects. To inaugurate the new Reformation by the execution of a Catholic clergyman appears to have been considered by him as a master-stroke of policy. But even the Lerdistas were not prepared for so desperate a step, and Foster was doomed to find his hopes blighted. Alluding to a conversation with Minister Lafragua in September, he writes to Mr. Fish, bemoaning his hard fate: “I thanked him for communicating the intelligence in relation to the trials of the assassins of Rev. Mr. Stephens, the receipt of which I had anxiously awaited, but expressed my disappointment in finding no mention of the proceedings had in the trial of the _cura_ of Ahualulco, to whom the published accounts attributed the responsibility of the assassination.…”