town for use, probably by the bakers or soap-boilers, who are said to pay fourteen shillings an aroba for it. Besides a little stunted grass, there was here no sign of vegetable life except a peculiar species of the cactus family, which resembled a mammoth beet without leaves, but bearing upon its top an array of vegetable knives that surrounded a most exquisite scarlet flower.
FATE OF ROBBERS.
There was another sight by the road side more in keeping with the gloomy thoughts which this desert plain excites: it was the dead bodies of three men, who had been condemned by a military commission for robbing a bishop. They were shot, and their bodies were placed on three gibbets as a warning to others. The bishop said he would have pardoned the robbery, but when they went to that extreme limit of depravity of searching within his shirt of sackcloth for concealed doubloons, it was more than a bishop could endure. The worthy ecclesiastic had renounced the world and all its vanities, and had put on the badges of poverty and self-mortification for $50,000 a year, and he wore the disguises that ought to have shielded him from the suspicion of being rich!