haps never in all his life had there ever come to them a look of craft or cruelty. His forehead was broad and high, prominent where ideality should abound, wanting a little in firmness, if phrenology is true, yet compact enough and well enough proportioned to indicate resources in reserve and abilities latent and easily aroused. To a large mouth was given the Hapsburg lip, that thick, protruding, semi-cleft under lip, too heavy for beauty, too immobile for features that, under the iron destiny that ruled the hour, should have suggested Cæsar or Napoleon. A great yellow beard fell in a wave to his waist. At times this was parted at the chin, and descended in two separate streams, as it were, silkier, glossier, heavier than any yellow beard of any yellow-haired Hun or Hungarian that had followed him from the Rhine and the Danube.

He said pleasant and courtly things in German, in English, Hungarian, Slavonic, French, Italian and Spanish. In natural kindness of temper, and in elegance and refinement of deportment, he surpassed all who surrounded him and all with whom he came in contact. Noblemen of great learning and cosmopolitan reputation were his teachers. Prince Esteraze taught him the Hungarian language; Count de Schnyder taught him mathematics; Thomas Zerman taught him naval tactics and the Italian language. A splendid horseman, he excelled also in athletic sports. With the broadsword or the rapier few men could break down his guard or touch him with the steel's point.

At the age of sixteen he visited Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Madeira and Africa. He was a poet who wrote sonnets that were set to music, a botanist, a book-maker, the captain of a frigate, an admiral. He did not love to see men die. All his nature was tenderly human. He loved flowers and music and statuary and the repose of the home circle and the fireside. He had a palace called Miramar, which was a paradise. Here the messengers found him when they came bearing in their hands the crown of Mexicoa gentle, lovable prince-adored by the Italians over whom he had ruled, the friend of the Third Napoleon, a possible heir to the throne of Austria, a chivalrous, elegant, polished gentleman.

How he died the world knows-betrayed, butchered, shot by a dead wall, thinking of Carlotta.

France never thoroughly understood the war between the States. Up to the evacuation of Richmond by Lee, Louis Napoleon believed religiously in the success of the Southern Confederacy. An alliance offensive and defensive with President Davis was proposed to him by Minister Slidell, an alliance which guaranteed to him the absolute possession of Mexico and the undisturbed erection of an empire within its borders. For this he was asked to raise the blockade at Charleston and New Orleans, and furnish for offensive operations a corps of 75,000 French soldiers. He declined

the alliance because he believed it unnecessary. Of what use to hasten a result, hear gued, which in the end would be inevitable?

After Appomattox Court House he awoke to something like a realization of the drama in which he was the chief actor. The French nation clamored against the occupation. Its cost was enormous in blood and treasure. America, sullen and vicious, and victor in a gigantic war, looked across the Rio Grande with her hand upon her sword. Diplomacy could do nothing against a million of men in arms. It is probable that in this supreme moment Mr. Seward revenged on France the degradation forced upon him by the Trent affair, and used language so plain to the Imperial minister that all ideas of further foothold or aggrandizement in the new world were abandoned at once and for ever.

When Shelby arrived in Mexico the situation was peculiar. Ostensibly Emperor, Maximilian had scarcely any more real authority than the Grand Chamberlain of his household. Bazaine was the military autocrat. The mints, the mines and the custom houses were in his possession. His soldiers occupied all the ports where exporting and importing were done. Divided first into military departments, and next into civil departments, a French general, or colonel, or officer of the line of some grade, commanded each of the first, and an Imperial Mexican of some kind, generally half Juarista and half robber, commanded each of the last. For their allies the French had a most supreme and sovereign contempt-a contempt as natural as it was undisguised. Conflicts, therefore, necessarily occurred. Civil law, even in sections where civil law might have been made beneficial, rarely ever lifted its head above the barricade of bayonets, and its officers-finding the French supreme in everything, especially in their contempt-surrendered whatever of dignity or official appreciation belonged to them, and without resigning or resisting, were content to plunder their friends or traffic with the enemy.

Perhaps France had a reason or two for dealing thus harshly with the civil administration of affairs. Maximilian was one of the most unsuspecting and confiding of men. He actually believed in Mexican faith and devotion-in such things as Mexican patriotism and love of peace and order. He would listen to their prom ises and become enthusiastic; to their plans and grow convinced; to their oaths and their pledges, and take no thought for to-morrow, when the oaths were to become false and the pledges violated. France wished to arouse him from his unnatural dream of trusting goodness and gentleness, and put in lieu of the fatal narcotic more of iron and blood.

France had indeed scattered lives freely in Mexico. At first England and Spain had joined with France in an invasion for certain feasible and specified purposes, none of which purposes, how

ever, were to establish an empire, enthrone a foreign prince, support him by a foreign army, seize possession of the whole Mexican country, govern it as part or the royal possessions, make of it in time, probably, a great menace, but certain-whatever the future might be to ruffle the feathers pretty roughly upon that winged relation of the great American eagle, the Monroe Doctrine.

Before the occupation, however, Mexico was divided into two parties-that of the Liberals, led by Juarez, and that of the church, its political management in the hands of the Archbishop, its military management in the hands of Miramon. Comonfort, an Utopian dreamer and Socialist, yet a liberal for all that, renounced the presidency in 1858. Thereupon the Capital of the nation was seized by the church party, Miramon at its head, and much wrong was done to foreigners, so much wrong, indeed, that from it the alliance sprung that was to sow all over the country a terrible crop of armed men.

In 1861 England, France and Spain united to demand from Mexico the payment of all claims owed by her, and to demand still further and stronger some absolute guarantee against future murders and spoliations.

England's demands were based upon the assertion that on the 16th day of November, 1860, Miramon unlawfully took from English residents one hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling. This money was in the house of the British Legation. The house was attacked, stoned, fired into, some of its domestics killed and wounded, and the Minister himself saved with difficulty. Afterward, at Tacubaya, an outlying village of the capital, seventy-three Englishmen were brutally murdered-shot at midnight in a ditch, and to appease, it is thought, a moment of savage superstition and cruelty. To this day it is not known even in Mexico why Miramon gave his consent to this horrid butchery. In other portions of the country, and indeed in every portion of it where there were Englishmen, they were insulted with impunity, robbed of their possessions, often imprisoned, sometimes murdered, and frequently driven forth penniless from among their tormentors.

A treaty had been made in Paris, in 1859, between Spain and the Church party, which provided for the payment of the Spanish claims. This treaty was annulled when Juarez came into power, and the refusal was peremptory to pay a single dollar to Spain. The somewhat novel declaration was also made that the Republic of Mexico owed to its own citizens about as much as it could pay, and that when discriminations had to be made they should be made against the foreigner. Spain became furiously indignant, and joined in with England in the alliance.

France had also her grievances.

A Swiss banker named Jecker,

who had been living in Mexico a few years prior to the Expedition of

the three great powers, had made a fortune high up among the millions. Miramon looked upon Jecker with awe and admiration, and from friends the two men soon became to be partners. A decree was issued by Miramon on the 29th of October, 1859, providing for the issuance of three millions pounds sterling in bonds. These bonds were to be taken for taxes and import duties, were to bear six per cent. interest, and were to have the interest paid for five years by the house of Jecker. As this was considerably above the average life of the average Mexican Government, Miramon felt safe in taking no thought of the interest after Jecker had paid for the first five years. Certain regulations also provided that the holders of these bonds might transfer them and receive in their stead Jecker's bonds, paying a certain percentage for the privilege of the transfer. Jecker was to issue the bonds and to receive five per cent. on the issue. He did not, however, consummate the arrangement as the provisions of the decree required, and at his own suggestion the contract was modified. At last the result narrowed itself down to this: the Church part stood bound for three millions seven hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling, and Jecker found himself in a position where it was impossible to comply with his contract. In May, 1860, his house suspended payment. His creditors got the bonds, the Church party gave place to the Liberal party, and then a general repudiation came. This party refused to acknowledge any debt based upon the Miramon-Jecker transaction, just as it had refused to carry out the stipulations of a sovereign treaty made with Spain.

The most of Jecker's creditors were Frenchmen, and Franceresolved to collect not only this debt, but claims to the amount of twelve millions of dollars besides. Failing to obtain a peaceful settlement, late in the year 1860, the French Minister left the Capital after this significant speech :

If there shall be a war between us it shall be a war of destruction."

And it was.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE three complaining powers-England, France and Spain – met in London, October, 1861, and agreed that each should send upon the Expedition an equal naval force, and that the number of troops to be furnished by each should be regulated accordin so to the num ber of subjects which the respective powers had in Mexico. It was further expressed and stipulated that the intervention should only be for the purpose of enforcing the payment of the claims assumed to be due, and that in no particular was any movement to be made looking to an occupation of the country. England, however, was dissatisfied with a portion of France's claim, and Spain coincided with England. Notwithstanding this fact, however, a joint fleet was sent to Vera Cruz, which reached its destination January 6, 1862. On the 7th, six thousand three hundred Spanish, two thousand eight hundred French, and eight hundred English troops were disembarked, and by a treaty made with Juarez at Soledad, and signed February 19, 1862, these troops were permitted to leave the fever marshes about Vera Cruz, and march to the glorious regions about Orizava.

Orizava, on the National Road midway between Cordova and Puebla, is a city whose climate and whose surroundings might recall to any mind the Garden of Eden. Its skies are always blue, its air is always balmy, its women are always beautiful, its fruit is always ripe, and its sweet repose but rarely broken by the clamor of marauding bands, or the graver warfare of more ferocious revolutionists.

To admit the strangers into such a land, sick from the tossings of the sea, and weak from the poison of the low lagoons, was worse for Juarez than a pitched battle wherein the victory rested with the invaders. Some of them at least would lay hands upon it for its beauty alone, if other and more plausible reasons could not be found. At an early day, however, the ambitious designs of Napoleon began to manifest themselves. There were some protests made, some sharp correspondence had, not a few diplomatic quarrels indulged in, and at last, to cut a knot they could not untie, the English and Spanish troops were ordered back peremptorily to Vera Cruz, the two nations abandoning the alliance, and withdrawing their forces entirely from the country. This left the French alone and unsupported. The treaty of Soledad expired, and they were ordered by Juarez to return to their original position. For answer there was an immediate attack.

The city of Peublo, ninety miles north from Orizava, strong by nature, had been still more strongly fortified, and was held by a