Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1845 edition. Excerpt: ...until serious fears were entertained of an explosion of his ire. He was too much absorbed with avarice, however, to be greatly disturbed by any other passion; and had his senior officer been a better man, perhaps Guts would have been a kinder master. This senior officer, who watched him so closely that he had to watch us with like diligence, was the Mayor de la Plaza, and next in command to the governor. When Admiral Baudin turned loose his French crackers upon them at Vera Cruz in 1838, it is said that this officer, in scampering out of danger, ran against a stone corner and knocked off his knee-pan, from which his leg has never since straightened. He walks with a staff, and upon the tip ends of his 268 OLD "LIMPY." LOUSING. toes, which gives him a gait uneven as that of the kangaroo. This old chap, whose temper, if possible, is more uneven than his gait, and whose mother entailed upon him the misery of a name that Texians never could pronounce, for short we called " Old Limpy." If we met worse men in Mexico, we certainly never met so mean a wretch as " Limpy." He would slip round the corners, and take all the low, eaves-dropping turns upon us of a mean negro. He would, by every means in his power, endeavour to curtail our liberties and comforts, the greatest of which was, after a cold night, to get on the sunshiny side of the wall and kill the vermin. This operation in Mexico occupies a large portion of the daylight of that nation; and I am told that from long habit, vermin-killing is almost as necessary an excitement to the vitality of this race as bread and meat is to ours. " There were lice upon man and beast," and it would be difficult to imagine that there could be a greater number in the country, even had the dust of the earth been "...