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 preserved him from the incursions of the Insurgents during the earlier stages of the Revolution: but the dread of Mina's name induced the Marquis to abandon all idea of resistance upon his approach. He quitted his house, and fled with his escort to San Luis Pŏtŏsī, while Mina occupied the Hacienda without opposition, and proceeded to take possession of its most valuable contents. The Marquis was known to have very large sums in specie, concealed about the house; and one of these secret hoards having been discovered, by the treachery of a servant, beneath the floor of a room adjoining the kitchen, one hundred and forty thousand dollars were dug out, and transferred to Mina's military chest. This is the estimate given by Mina's friends, but the Marquis himself made his loss amount to three hundred thousand dollars, and such he states it to have been, at the present day. But without entering into any controversy as to the amount, the fact of the private property of a Creole nobleman having been seized by Mina, as good and lawful booty, according to his ideas of the laws of war, was universally known, and certainly did not tend to increase the number of his adherents. Most of the great landed proprietors of the country had taken the same line as the Marquis of the Jaral, and not only kept upon terms with the Government, but assisted it by contributions, not voluntary indeed, but in proportion to the supposed means of each. If this compliance with the requisitions, of the Viceroy were