destined by nature to be a paradise, but of which the inhabitants were
then making a Tartarus. To the horrors then perpetrated by robbers or
highwaymen, justice could be done only by the pen of a Poe.

Kidnapping was not infrequent, and the cruel ingenuity displayed by the
bandits to keep safely their victim pending the negotiations for a
ransom was often blood-curdling. I might fill a small volume with such
anecdotes, but the terrible fate of two hacendados, kidnapped in the
interior of the country, may suffice to give an idea of the tax which
living in Mexico at that time might levy upon the emotions of a young
girl fresh from Paris.

The two unfortunate men had been captured by one of those small bands
which in war-times were called guerrillas, but which we should
ordinarily call banditti. They were dragged from place to place about
the country by their captors, who kept them under strict surveillance.
One evening, as they were approaching a town, the prospect of a riotous
night spent over pulque and monte at some fonda excited the imagination
of the men, and, as no one would consent to be deprived of the
anticipated pleasure for the sake of mounting guard over the prisoners,
it was decided that the miserable victims should be, for safe-keeping,
buried up to their necks in the earth. Surely they could not escape, and
would be there next morning awaiting the return of their captors. And so
they no doubt would have been, but for the coyotes, which, allured by
the easy prey delivered up to them by the devilish ingenuity of those
human fiends, came during the night and devoured the heads of the
helpless victims. Who can ever realize the mental and physical anguish
in the midst of which those two wretched lives came to an end?

Sometimes there was a touch of weird humor in the manner in which such