in our favor, and will drive us towards Havana. Our Spanish friends concluded their cordial and disinterested kindness, by setting off with us by day-break this morning, in a large boat with Spanish colors unfurled, crossing the bar with us, coming on board, and running no small risk in recrossing it, with every prospect of a norther before their eyes. We stopped at the house of the "Marine Monster," Don Leonardo Mata, before crossing the bar, took up our shells, and had the felicity of making his acquaintance. He is a colossal old man, almost gigantic in height, and a Falstaff in breadth; gruff in his manners, yet with a certain clumsy good-nature about him. He performs the office of pilot with so much exclusiveness, charging such high prices, governing the men with so iron a sway, and arranging everything so entirely according to his own fancy, that he is a complete sovereign in his own small way—the tyrant of Tampico. He has in his weather-beaten face such a mixture of bluffness and slyness, with his gigantic person, and abrupt, half-savage manners, that, altogether, I conceive him to be a character who might have been worthy the attention of Walter Scott, had he chanced to encounter him. Old and repulsive as he is, he has lately married a pretty young girl, a subject on which he does not brook raillery. One amiable trait the old tyrant has in his character; his affection for his old mother, who is upwards of ninety, and who resides at Mahon, and to whom he is constant in his attentions. At one time he was in the habit of sending her small sums of money; but as they were frequently lost, he sent her five hundred dollars at once
