PORFIRIO PARRA.

before he has completed his course, toadies in politics, rapidly rising to importance as the private secretary of a departmental minister, and marries great wealth. Pacotillas, the hero, is an astonishing combination of strong and weak qualities. Of lofty ideals, of great firmness in announcing and supporting them, and of brilliant intellectual powers, he is cold, morose, lacking in initiative, easily depressed, and procrastinating. He smokes constantly and excessively and readily yields to drink. He loves a beautiful and amiable girl and lives with her without marriage; though he realizes the injustice this is to her, the injustice—excused at the time by poverty—is never atoned for in his days of comparative prosperity. Pacotillas and his beautiful Amalia suffer enormous trials of poverty; Paco finally secures a position on the force of an opposition paper. He antagonizes the government, is arrested and thrown in jail, where he dies of typhus. The book is an interesting picture of Mexican life, but it is a particularly difficult task to make brief selections from it for translation.