party in power wished to stand well with foreign governments. A detachment of soldiers accompanied the police; and, led by me, hastened to the wayside inn. The yard gate was found closed. The officer gave the word, and it was instantly battered open with the stocks of the soldiers’ muskets. Two men were found, by the light of a lantern, digging a grave, no doubt intended to receive my remains, in a corner of the enclosure. They were surrounded and captured, and of course proved to be Diego and his master.
When the villains were arrested, they showed much dismay, but on catching sight of me, their superstitious dread overcame them. They fell flat on their faces, yelling to Heaven for mercy, and loudly and incoherently confessed their crime.
“Let them touch you,” said the Mexican captain: “they take you for a ghost. Caramba! they thought their job a finished one.”
But when the wretches were convinced that I was not only alive, but unhurt, their bearing changed, and they began to deny their late confession.
“We shall see about that!” said the officer, grimly; and by his orders the ruffians were led, under a strong guard, and bound, into the fatal chamber. There, on the bed, under the torn and blood-bespattered bed-clothes, lay the silent witness—the poor slaughtered man.
“Will you deny, now?” asked the officer, harshly.
The room was now flooded with bright torch-light. There the body lay, huddled up under the clothes, and with the face hidden by a pillow. The dark hair floated about it, dishevelled. Both ruffians trembled, but Diego first regained his audacity.
“Demonios! You have got us: can’t you hang us without all this fuss? For my part, I wish—”
He was cut short by an agonised scream. The landlord’s wife, disturbed by the noise, had entered, to find her husband a prisoner, and that a crime, of all knowledge of which she was innocent, had been committed. But worse still, in the mangled corpse before her, the mother’s eye recognised her son—her only son—slain by his father’s hands in the dark, and she rushed up, and clasped his cold form in her arms, with a cry that will haunt me to my dying day.
“Then the drunken intruder was the landlord’s son?”
“The same. The pale student. It was proved that the lad, a precocious debauchee and gambler, had the habit of stealing out at night to join his friends, who were the worst scamps in Xalapa. On this particular night, he had returned with some comrades, much intoxicated, and fearing to arouse his parents, who believed him quietly asleep hours before, had asked his friends to help him in through the open window of my room, which he imagined to be unoccupied; and therefore chose to stop there instead of stumbling to his own chamber. Hence the catastrophe.”
“The landlord? Diego?”
“Were hanged at daybreak, after a hasty shrift by a priest. Justice is summary in Mexico. The despatches and my purse were found concealed in a cupboard. But the poor mother—my heart ached for her, poor thing!—I heard afterwards that her reason had fled. By Jove! there’s but five minutes to catch the train. Good-bye, Tom, good-bye.”
INVASION OF 1863:
A CALL FOR VOLUNTEER DEFENCE.
I wish I had remembered in time,—I wish a good many other citizens had remembered in time, how the 14th of May is made a festival of in Prussia and some other countries. To have made a festival of the 14th of May—or, as some people may think more appropriate, a fast, or a day of humiliation—would have been the most emphatically useful way of spending the day that we could now devise.
Prussia has reason for her rejoicing; for, by an event which occurred on the 14th of May, 1796, nearly forty thousand lives a year were saved before the century was out; and the number has since increased, of course, in proportion to the increase of population. The event thus commemorated was the brave act of Dr. Jenner—of vaccinating a child from the hand of a dairywoman who had the pock straight from the cow. In consequence of that act, there was a saving of 210,000 lives annually in Europe; and at the time of this fearful venture, as Dr. Jenner’s friends considered it, the mortality from smallpox in the known parts of the world was twenty-five millions every quarter of a century. The numbers seem scarcely credible, but they are well ascertained; and some explanation of the rapid and vast increase just before Jenner’s time is afforded by the calamitous introduction of inoculation. Much courage and excellent intention will always be attributed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who introduced the practice from Turkey, and to those whom she converted: but they did not foresee, and for a long time society did not perceive, that the constant keeping alive of the disease would destroy more than inoculation could save. Year by year the disease became as terrific as it formerly was at intervals when it came as a plague, carrying off its tens of thousands in each country, and then subsiding, and passing almost out of sight for a course of years. Spain was very little troubled with smallpox (except on occasion), while it was ravaging in other countries, because in Spain inoculation was not permitted after its danger was perceived; and in France the evil became much mitigated after 1763, from the prohibition of inoculation. These facts are striking; but more so is the historical truth that Sweden, Denmark, and some German States were absolutely free from smallpox for twenty years after vaccination was properly enforced by the respective governments.
In view of these facts I need not explain why the 14th of May this year should be a day of humiliation in England. After believing for the lifetime of two generations that we had no more to dread from the most fearful of diseases—after being long accustomed to speak of it as one of the barbarisms and afflictions which the world,—or at least Europe,—or at all events England had outgrown, we find ourselves plunged back into the horror of it. Instead of hearing of a case of smallpox as a