formal manners of the Spaniards have descended to the Mexicans. You are received cordially but carefully, and you must either be useful or known, before you are admitted into the confidence of a family. Until this occurs your reception and departure from a Mexican dwelling are quite as ceremonious as your initiation into a Masonic lodge. Bows, gestures, shrugs, grimaces, and all the ordinary rites of external politeness are plentifully bestowed on the stranger;—"But sad is the plight of the luckless knight," who imagines that these elegant formalities literally mean what they profess. Americans, especially, whose extraordinary and loose social facilities habituate them to an unrestrained intercourse with all the members of families as soon as they are either prudently or imprudently introduced to them,—are often in danger of making this sad mistake in Mexico. Neither wealth, education, nor political position, entitle an individual in that republic to pass the threshold of distant and civil intercourse. The Mexican's house, purse, or daughter, are not at "your disposal," although he tells you that everything he possesses is "à la disposicion de Usted!" Yet, when his acquaintance has ripened into friendship, and he understands that you appreciate his tastes, his country, his language, his prejudices, his religion, and his habits, or do not visit him, as many foreigners have done, merely to scoff and condemn,—then, indeed, the social manners of the Mexican relax into intimacy, and the attention he bestows on you may be more firmly trusted because it was so cautiously yielded. The stranger who penetrates a Mexican house under such circumstances, finds its hospitality unbounded, and its generous inmates his devoted and faithful servants either for life or until he forfeits their esteem by treachery or misconduct.
In every Mexican church, monastery, convent, palace, house, hut, hovel, hacienda, or rancho, the traveller will not fail to observe an image of "The Virgin of Guadalupe." Many men receive the name of "Guadalupe," in baptism, and almost every woman has it added to the others she receives from her parents or sponsors. A saint whose tutelary influence is at once so national and so curious deserves especial mention in the notice of a country over whose people she is supposed to exercise a mysterious dominion; and we therefore present the reader the following translation from the Spanish of Don Ignacio Barillo y Perez, in which the history of her miraculous appearance is set forth with more detail than we have elsewhere encountered.