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more lovely, and when from your balcony you made me with a smile the happiest man in the world."

Such words were never lost ones; for the Señora had a true and great love for her husband. She gave him again a smile, she put her hand in his, and then there were no further conciliations required. They stood in the sunshine of their own hearts, and listened a moment to the gay youth, singing, how at

The strong old Alamo

Two hundred men, with rifles true,
Shot down a thousand of the foe,
And broke the triple ramparts through;
And dropped the flag as black as night,

For Freedom's green and red and white.*

*The flag of the Mexican Republic of 1824 was green, red and white in color.

CHAPTER XI.

A HAPPY TRUC E.

"Well, honor is the subject of my story;
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but for my single self,
I had as lief not be, as live to be

In awe of such a thing as I myself."

"Two truths are told

As happy prologues to the swelling act,
Of the imperial theme."

"This is the eve of Christmas,

No sleep from night to morn;

The Virgin is in travail,

At twelve will the Child be born."

CITIES, have not only a certain physiog

nomy; they have also a decided mental and moral character, and a definite political tendency. There are good and bad cities, artistic and commercial cities, scholarly and manufacturing cities, aristocratic and radical cities. San Antonio, in its political and social character, was a thoroughly radical city. Its population, composed in a large measure of adventur

ous units from various nationalities, had that

fluid rather than fixed

character, which is sus

For they were generally

ceptible to new ideas.

men who had found the restraints of the centuries behind them to be intolerable-men to whom freedom was the grand ideal of life.

It may be easily undertood that this element in the population of San Antonio was a powerful one, and that a little of such leaven would stir into activity a people who, beneath the crust of their formal piety, had still something left of that pride and adventurous spirit which distinguished the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel.

In fact, no city on the American continent has such a bloody record as San Antonio. From its settlement by the warlike monks of 1692, to its final capture by the Americans in 1836, it was well named " the city of the sword." The Comanche and the white man fought around its walls their forty years' battle for supremacy. From 1810 to 1821 its streets were constantly bloody with the fight between the royalists and republicans, and the city and the citadel passed from one party to the

other continually. And when it

came to the

question of freedom and American domina

tion, San Antonio was, as it had ever been, the great Texan battle-field.

Its citizens then were well used to the for

tunes and changes of war. Men were living who had seen the horrors of the auto da fe and the splendors of viceregal authority. Insurgent nobles, fighting priests, revolutionizing Americans, all sorts and conditions of men, all chances and changes of religious and military power, had ruled it with a temporary absolutism during their generation.

In the main there was a favorable feeling regarding its occupation by the Americans. The most lawless of them were law-abiding in comparison with any kind of victorious Mexicans. Americans protected private property, they honored women, they observed the sanctity of every man's home; "and, as for being heretics, that was an affair for the saints and the priests; the comfortable benefits of the Holy Catholic Church, had not been vouchsafed to all nations."

Political changes are favorable to religious tolerance, and the priests themselves had been. sensible of a great decrease in their influence during the pending struggle. Prominent Mexi

cans had given aid and comfort to the Americans in spite of their spiritual orders, and there were many men who, like Lopez Navarro, did not dare to go to confession, because they would have been compelled to acknowledge

themselves rebels.

When the doctor and Dare and Luis reached the Plaza, the morning after the surrender, they found the city already astir. Thousands of women were in the churches saying masses for the dead; the men stood at their store doors or sat smoking on their balconies, chatting with the passers-by or watching the movements of the victorious army and the evacuation of the conquered one.

Nearly all of the brave two hundred occupied the Plaza. They were still greatly excited by the miraculous ecstacy of victory. But when soldiers in the death-pang rejoice under its influence, what wonder that the living feel its intoxicating rapture? They talked and walked as if they already walked the streets of Mexico. All things seemed possible to them. The royalty of their carriage, the authority in their faces, gave dignity even to their deerskin clothing. Its primitive character was its

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