a woman only can render. When death stared me in the face, and she could do nothing for a perishing heretic except to solicit a passing procession to chant a misericordia por un infirmo Americano, that kindly office was not wanting. When, with returning health, I ventured out into the street, leaning upon a staff, a poor Indian woman, forgetting her native shyness, begged me to sit down under the shade of her roof while she prepared for me a little orange-water, and when, a little refreshed by her orange-water, I tottered on, I shall never forget the look of sympathy which she bestowed upon an unknown stranger. An Indian woman is always kind, but the kindest of her race is the poor despised Indian woman of Spanish America.
It is too common to look down coldly, and not unfrequently with contempt, upon those who occupy the humbler walks of life, and to speak only of their vices. The peon has his vices, and they are glaring enough, but he is certainly not worse than his white neighbor. I had been so long in California, and had seen so many exhibitions of courage in street-fights and personal encounters, that I had come almost to consider the words white man and brave man as synonymous. But when I found myself in Mexico at the breaking out of a civil war, I soon learned that white men are not always brave, and that they were superior to the Indian in little else except in the gilding with which they covered their vicious and corrupt lives. They borrow their customs from Paris and their style of living, but their morals are even below the Paris standard of virtue.
WOMAN'S RIGHTS AT MEXICO.
The law, which sinks the civil existence of the wife in the husband, and which charges the husband with liability for the debts and trespasses of the wife, is sometimes stigmatized as harsh, unnatural, and tyrannical. If