mill would be untenable. But repeated successes had made the American officers imprudent, so that without first battering down its walls, the division of General Worth rushed up, regardless of a flank fire of the castle, to carry this old building by assault. After the sacrifice of about 700 lives, cannon were brought out and the breach made, and then the difficulty was at an end.
A mile or so by the road leading south and west from Chapultepec is Tacubaya, where are the suburban residences of the Archbishop, the President, and of divers city bankers; and where the English banker, Mr. Jimmerson, has introduced English gardening, and, in a Mexican climate, enjoys the pleasure of an English country residence.
DON MANUEL ESCANDON.
The most attractive establishment of Tacubaya is the new palace of Don Manuel Escandon, a native-born, self-made Mexican millionaire; a man whose capital has so enormously accumulated before he has even reached middle life, that he was able to propose to discount a bill for $7,000,000 as an ordinary business transaction, though ultimately government divided the bid with another house. This most remarkable instance of accumulation of wealth in modern times is deserving of a passing notice, which I give on the authority of my landlord, who had a personal knowledge of his history.
Don Manuel enjoyed, in addition to an intimate knowledge of his own countrymen, the advantages of a foreign education, which had extended to an examination of those arts and improvements that elevate Europeans above the semi-barbarous people of Spanish America. The first enterprise that brought him prominently forward was the establishment of that vast and most perfect system of stage-coaches, of which I have already spoken, on an original capital of $250,000.