the daughter of an old antagonist, he gave Mexico a uni

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young woman of unusual beauty of person and character, highly educated (in the United States), fluent in French and English as in the best Spanish, Carmelita," as she is lovingly called by all Mexico, rich and poor alike, has been her husband's complement not only in the home but in the nation. To the social charm of a high-bred Spanish woman, and the heart of universal womanhood, she adds the horizons of a modern education. Gracious and unspoiled, prominent in all benevolences, and a model in the exigent Spanish traditions of the homekeeper, she has won love beyond any other woman in Mexican history.

The Presidential family is a pleasant one all through. Of the two daughters, one is married. The son, Porfirio junior, has recently taken his degree as civil engineer, after as stiff a course as if he had been a peon's boy, and through a final examination which was made unusually rigorous by his father's wish. "The President's son," said Diaz, "must have nothing which he has not surely earned." It was an innovation when Diaz declined to live in the national palace. Part of the year he resides in his private house in the Street of the Chain, but part in the historic castle of Chapultepec-the home of Motecuzoma, a palace of the Viceroys from Galvez down, and the chosen spot

A GLIMPSE OF CHAPULTEPEC.

Be

of Maximilian and Carlota. The rock Hill of the Grasshopper, set amid immemorial ahuehuetes, has at its feet the making of the noblest park in the world, of its size; and no other palace in any land commands so superb a view. low, the strong spring of "Montezuma's Bath" wells up under the gigantic trees; and the twin aqueducts, like inconceivable centipedes turned to stone, twist away toward the city; and the outcrop rock is carved with the pictoglyphs of forgotten Aztec war-captains. Behind is the historic field of Molino del Rey; and at the

top, elbowing the palace, the military academy whose schoolboys were defeated by the army of the United States.

One tires of "lives stranger than ro'mance"-in the romances; but, seriously, it would be a confident novelist who ventured to invent a career like that of Diaz and date it in this century. It reads rather like a chapter from the Crusades than like anything we can realize as modern American. Probably no other ruler since the Lion Heart has run quite such a gamut

"of most disastrous chances;

Of moving accidents by flood and field; Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;

Of being taken by the insolent foe."

Hero of more than fifty battles-and not by heliograph, but at the head of his men -ablaze with decorations when in full dress, but with not enough medals to cover one apiece the scars that earned them; leader of desperate charges and defender of forlorn hopes; half a dozen times prisoner, and as often escaping by the narrowest hazards; forty years in service, and almost all of it uphill on grades that might have daunted Sisyphus-it is a wonderful story between the orphan boy of Oaxaca and the head of modern Mexico. It would be impossible here to go into that career with any detail; but the barest outline is significant.

Porfirio Diaz was born in the city of Oaxaca, September 15, 1830, on the anniversary of the birth of Mexican independence. There has been confusion as to the locality, and in the city itself are a score of contradictory relations, so I have taken pains to be fortified over his own hand:

"It was in the city of Oaxaca, street of la Soledad, south side, No. 10, in which house is now a sugar-factory."

His father, Captain José Faustino Diaz, was of Asturian stock which came to Mexico in the first years of the Conquest. He died in 1833. Doña Petrona Mory, Porfirio's forceful mother, brought him the drop of aboriginal blood, her grandmother having been a Mixteca. She marked the boy out for the Church; and after finishing with the primary school at seven, taking his turn as errand-boy in a store, and going to the secondary school from eight to fourteen, he entered the seminary. The family had lost its modest fortune, and he supported himself by tutoring.

Here he fell in the way of the great Zapotec, Juarez, then Governor of the state, who took a generous interest in the unguessed lad who was to mean so much to Mexico and to Juarez.

At seventeen Porfirio volunteered, with some of his comrades, for the war with the United States. To their grief they were not sent to the front, but served as a home militia--the redoubtable company of the "Better-than-Nothings," as ribald townsmen dubbed them.

Against his mother's hope, his patron's rage, and the scandal of the bishop, the young theologue soon decided to be a lawyer and not a priest. Thrown entirely on his own resources, he kept in the institute by taking pupils and by the slender help of the librarianship, secured for him by the Governor. Graduating from the four years' course, he entered the lawoffice of Juarez, becoming also professor of Roman law in his alma mater, and president of the law-club of Oaxaca.

His first taste of war was under Herrera, in revolt against the usurper Santa Anna. In the plebiscite Diaz was the only student who dared walk up to the tables and sign against the tyrant; and for this audacity had to fly for his life. In the revolution which ended in the expulsion of that strange cross of ass and wolf, whom one of the most naïve of Mexican folk-songs celebrates in "La pata de Sant' Anna," young Diaz became Jefe Politico (mayor) of Ixtlan. In this hamlet was the first fair scope for the military bent which had been visible even in his childhood. He drilled the half-naked Indians of his jefatura on Sundays, holding them by dances, a gymnasium, and the like artifices until he had a really valuable militia. When Garcia "pronounced" in Oaxaca, the boy Mayor of Ixtlan marched on that capital with his aborigines and induced the usurper to "take it back"; and upon Garcia's renewal of the pronunciamento, Diaz returned and took the city, and the small despot fled. this service Diaz refused the pay proffered him. A little later he resigned his post as Mayor to become Captain in the National Guard at less than half the pay. and won his first laurels in crushing the rebellion of Jamiltepec. Badly wounded. he saw the weak point in the insurgent lines, and won the day. It was a week before he reached a doctor, and he carried the bullet more than a year.

For

In 1858, when Cobos (Conservative) attacked Oaxaca, Diaz beat him off, pursued him, and whipped him again at Jalapa, fighting against heavy odds. As the war of the Reforma broadened, Juarez gave the young officer the important post of Jefe of Tehuantepec. In this remote corner, unaided by the beset government and sore pressed by the Conservatives (Church party), he not only held his own for two years in the field, but began to give earnest of administrative skill, straightening out the sorry tangle of public affairs in Tehuantepec, and trying his 'prentice hand at public education and "better government." In April, 1858, at the Hacienda de las Jicaras, he set the pattern of tactics always thereafter characteristic of him-the night march and the daybreak assault. In all his military career it was the case that the other man did not get up quite early enough.

In June of the next year he won the important action of the Mixtequilla and a lieutenant-colonelcy. Still weak from

the operation to extract the bullet of Jamiltepec, he defended in Juchitan and then convoyed safely across the isthmus a store of munitions of war, obeying the spirit but breaking the letter of government instructions to destroy it before it should fall into the enemy's hands. In November, Alarcon having captured Tehuantepec, Diaz stormed it at dawn with three hundred men, and took it back for Mexico. In January, 1860, with five hundred raw troops, he met and routed Cobos's superior force near Mitla, leading the charge at the critical moment.

Oaxaca elected him a deputy to Congress; and when in June, 1861, Marquez attacked the national capital, Diaz hurried from the legislative halls, headed the defending forces, and defeated the revolutionists. For this he was made Chief of Brigade of Oaxaca. He pursued Marquez for two months, and August 13, 1861, attacked the rebels by night in Jalatlaco. It was a hand-to-hand fight, marked by another of the almost miraculous escapes

which gave Diaz the name of an enchanted life, and was another victory for him. But the other divisions of the army were not so successful; and President Juarez, whose greatness lay rather in steadfastness than in resource, seemed to lack the talent for unification. His sluggishness permitted the Church party to gain great headway, and at the same time his measures weakened and split the Nationalists. An unpaid army, increased taxes, forced loans, and the suicidal repudiation of the foreign debt not only crippled the government at home, but brought about its ears the armed intervention of France, England, and Spain. When the actual invasion began, in the spring of 1862, Juarez set the brigades of Mejia and Diaz to make front against the invaders, while he should gather forces in the interior. A magazine explosion practically wiped out Mejia's command, and Diaz was left to bear the brunt. His brother Felix, who was with him at the front, stood off a thousand zouaves with a handful of lancers until seventy-five per cent. of his men were slain and he was wounded and a prisoner. Watching his chance, he limped toward his pet horse, flung himself across its back, and escaped through a rain of lead. Porfirio covered the retreat of General Zaragoza on Puebla, checking the French at the hill of Aculzingo. During the siege of Puebla which followed, Diaz held the most exposed position, the road to Amazoc. In the splendid battle which gave Mexico one of her proudest anniversaries, the Cinco de Mayo (May 5, 1862), Diaz and his raw men met on level ground the trained European soldiers of Lorencez, withstood their charges, turned them, and chased them.

In January, 1863, the French general Forey laid siege to Puebla with an outnumbering force and by precise stages. In one of the many assaults on the corner held by Diaz the zouaves broke into the first court-yard of his stronghold, the Meson de San Marcos. Diaz ran back alone to the solitary field - piece which commanded the gate, chucked it full of cobble-stones in default of cannon-balls, and mowed down the foremost of the enemy; then, at the head of his reanimated men, whipped out the storming party and closed the breach. On May 17 the beleaguered city had to capitulate, but Diaz refused to take parole with the other officers, and soon made his escape.

At this juncture President Juarez offered to make him Secretary of War or commander of an army corps; but Diaz declined both honors on the ground that such promotion of so young a man would cause harmful jealousies. He covered the retreat of the national government from Mexico to San Luis Potosí, reorganized the army as commander-in-chief, and accepted command of the Army of the East, with jurisdiction from Puebla to Central America. Marching down from Querétaro with a small force, across the states of Mexico and Michoacan, under the very noses of the enemy, and capturing Tasco en route, he reached Oaxaca and established headquarters. His commission as General of Division, the highest rank in the Mexican army, came next. In three years the Nobody of Oaxaca had risen to be second only to the President of the republic, and almost the last hope of his country. The capital, the chief cities and posts, and nearly all the northern states were in the hands of the enemy; the very government was vagrant; but down in Oaxaca Diaz kept a "solid south." By a remarkable administrative ability he soon put his native state on a business basis, besides garrisoning its important points and gathering at his own elbow 3000 drilled men and the cash to handle them. As his strength there led the French to turn more toward the north, Diaz began to move up, until General Brincourt and a large force were sent to check him. In December, 1864, the largest campaign of the Intervention was aimed at him; and early in 1865 these vastly superior forces shut him up in Oaxaca. The self-made Mexican had already become of such consideration that Bazaine took the field against him in person; and after a vain attempt to bargain (with equal honors in the imperial army as an inducement), pressed the siege at once with vigor and a caution palpably bent on avoiding all slips. The beleaguered tightened their hungry belts, and ran the church bells into cannon-balls.

At the beginning of the end, Diaz took his post at the howitzer in a church tower, and kept it hot till every man of the crew but one beside him was slain, and his officers came up and dragged him away.

After three weeks of hopeless resistance, Oaxaca capitulated. All the captured officers except three pledged themselves to stand neutral the rest of the war;