WEDNESDAY, MAY 3. This morning I examined into all the circumstances connected with the robbery. The wound of the clerk, which he says he received from a cudgel, is a slight cut, apparently made by some sharp instrument. The chisel, with which the chest was forced, corresponds in width to one for sale on the shelf. Of the thousand dollars locked up in the chest and drawers, not one, it seems, escaped; not a quarter or fip fell to the floor; all went into the sack of the robbers, though they worked in the dark. And then, as he alleges, the robbers were volunteers without their uniform, and with their faces blacked. If so thoroughly disguised, how could he know they were volunteers? From these circumstances I have no doubt the rogue robbed himself, and raised the hue and cry to cover the transaction. But we shall see; the thing will out yet. SUNDAY, MAY 9. This is my birth-day. I am on the shaded side of that hill which swells midway between the extremities of life. The past seems but a dream, and the future will soon be so. To what has been and to what may be, I seem to myself almost indifferent. I know the vanities in which human hopes end; I know that life itself is only a bubble that has caught the hues of some falling star. And yet this airy phantom is not all such as it would seem; there is something besides shadow in its evanescent form. Our visions of happiness may prove an illusion, but our sorrows are real. It is no fancied knell that shakes the bier; no imaginary pall that wraps the loved and the lost. The grave is invested with the awful majesty of the real. MONDAY, MAY 10. I had directed the constable to get a pair of iron hinges made for one of the doors of the prison. He gave the order to a blacksmith, a crabbed old fellow, who charged eight dollars for his coarse work. As the charge was an imposition, I told the constable not to take the hinges; when up came the blacksmith with them to the office, and, in a fit of passion, hurled them at my feet, as I stood in the piazza. I handed the constable eight dollars, and told him to call on the blacksmith, pay him for the hinges, take his receipt, and then bring him before me. All which was done, and before me stood the smith, with his choler yet up. I told him that his violence and indignity would not be passed over; that I should fine him ten dollars for the benefit of the town, which he might pay or go to prison. After a few moments’ hesitation, he laid the ten dollars on the table, and took his departure without uttering a word. When clear of the office he grumbled out to the constable, “For once in my life I have been outwitted; that Yankee alcalde has not only got my hinges for nothing, but two dollars besides. I don’t wonder he can swing his prison doors at that rate; I would have tried the calaboose but for the infernal fleas.” The constable told him the next time he made hinges he must charge what they were worth, and curb his towering temper.