getting more than half way up.



AN INCIDENT

IN THE WAR OF MEXICAN INDEPENDENCE.

The following thrilling narrative is from a translation in Sharpe's
Magazine. A captain in the Mexican insurgent army is giving an account
of a meditated night attack upon a hacienda situated in the Cordilleras,
and occupied by a large force of Spanish soldiers. After a variety of
details, he continues:

"Having arrived at the hacienda unperceived, thanks for the obscurity of
a moonless night, we came to a halt under some large trees, at some
distance from the building, and I rode forward from my troop, in order
to reconnoitre the place. The hacienda, so far as I could see in gliding
across, formed a huge, massive parallelogram, strengthened by enormous
buttresses of hewn stone. Along this chasm, the walls of the hacienda
almost formed the continuation of another perpendicular one, chiselled
by nature herself in the rocks, to the bottom of which the eye could not
penetrate, for the mists, which incessantly boiled up from below, did
not allow it to measure their awful depth. This place was known, in the
country, by the name of 'the Voladero.'"

"I had explored all sides of the building except this, when I know not
what scruple of military honor incited me to continue my ride along the
ravine which protected the rear of the hacienda. Between the walls and
the precipice, there was a narrow pathway about six feet wide; by day,