introduce more or less obscurity in every sentence where it is so admitted. Strict syntatical order would require (the pronoun "we" being followed immediately by "laden") that--not the asses--but Lieutenant Slidell and his companions should be laden with the various commodities. And now, too, we began to see horsemen jantily dressed in slouched hat, embroidered jacket, and worked spatterdashes, reining fiery Andalusian coursers, each having the Moorish carbine hung at hand beside him. Were horsemen, in this instance, a _generic_ term--that is, did the word allude to horsemen generally, the use of the "_slouched hat_" and "_embroidered jacket_" in the singular, would be justifiable--but it is not so in speaking of individual horsemen, where the plural is required. The participle "_reining_" properly refers to "_spatterdashes_," although of course intended to agree with "_horsemen_." The word "_each_," also meant to refer to the "_horsemen_," belongs, strictly speaking, to the "_coursers_." The whole, if construed by the rigid rules of grammar, would imply that the horsemen were dressed in spatterdashes--which spatterdashes reined the coursers--and which coursers had each a carbine. Perhaps these were farmers of the better order; but they had not the air of men accustomed to labor; they were rather, perhaps, Andalusian horse-dealers, or, maybe, robbers, of those who so greatly abound about the capital, who for the moment, had laid aside their professional character. This is an exceedingly awkward sentence. The word "_maybe_" is, we think, objectionable. The repetition of the relative "_who_" in the phrases "_who so greatly abound_" and "_who for the moment had laid aside_," is the less to be justified, as each "_who_" has a different antecedent--the one referring to "_those_" (the robbers, generally, who abound about the capital) and the other to the suspected "_robbers_" then present. But the whole is exceeding ambiguous, and leaves a doubt of the author's true meaning. For, the words "_Andalusian horse-dealers, or, maybe, robbers of those who abound about the capital_," may either imply that the men in question were some of a class of robbers who abounded, &c. or that they were men who robbed (that is, robbers of) the Andalusian horse-dealers who abounded, &c. or that they were either Andalusian horse-dealers, or robbers of those who abound about the capital--i.e. of the inhabitants of the suburbs. Whether the last "_who_" has reference to _the robbers_, or to _those who abound_, it is impossible to learn from any thing in the sentence itself--which, taken altogether, is unworthy of the merest tyro in the rules of composition.