Your head is eminently level, Señor Sandoval| I endorse your sentiments to the very letter. Si Niña hermosa; I know her well! Teeth of pearl, lips of coral; that is her description to the life! Hang me, Leonardo, if you are not an artist as well as a poet and tobacconist! When next I enter your shop on the corner of the street of the Aduana and San Felipe, in orange-embowered Guadalajara, I will cultivate a more intimate cquaintance. Niña hermosa, I should like wonderfully well to drink to your health just now, but as I have not the essential for such a demonstration with me, I will do the best I can under the circumstances, and give you a puff—from my cigarrito!
The blue smoke curls gracefully upward, rising through the madroño branches in a slender column, so like a delicate, long-stemmed wine-glass in form, as to awaken a double recollection and association in my mind. I stand again on the Red Desert, hot, blistering sand beneath my feet, a brazen sky all aflame above, and bare, red mountains flickering in the reflected rays of the fierce, blazing sun of the south, around me, gazing on a scene so sad, that even I, bitter Indian-hater that I am and must be. witness with heartfelt pain. Let me see how it all came about.
It was in the autumn of 1863 when the mad rush across the Colorado Desert, to the newly found gold and copper mines beyond the Colorado, in Arizona, was at its height. The heat and dust, and consequent sufferings of the poorly outfitted participants in the rush, were terrible. What will not man suffer for the
