basin, around which we drank, and washed our faces over and again. In this open court, upon this brick pavement, myself and companions were quartered.

It was but a little time before the candy-girls ascertained that we had money; and being greatly rejoiced, as we believed that this was the termination of our march, we luxuriated in sweet cakes and ice creams. Having procured a gourd full of vino mascal, we did not forget in our thanksgiving that, through the goodness of God, our distinguished countryman, General Andrew Jackson, had this day reached his seventy-sixth year.13

This evening Mr. Cursin, bearer of despatches from the government of the United States, and Captain West, came into our quarters to see us. These [216] gentlemen manifested the liveliest interest for our welfare. Hearing that we were approaching the city, they rode out on the San Christoval road several leagues to meet us; but, finding we had taken a more westerly route, they returned, and told us "that an order had gone forth several days from Santa Anna to shoot all our companions behind, and doubtless they would be, if they had not already been shot; that President Houston had written to Mexico, through the British chargé d'affaires in Texas, saying 'that though we had entered Mexico contrary to his orders, and without authority of law, yet he begged mercy for us;' that our friends in the city thought us in imminent danger," &c. One less acquainted with President Houston than myself might have ascribed such a letter to some unaccountable misapprehension or to political stupidity. But, knowing his undisguised malignity and cold-blooded vindictiveness, not only to Colonel Fisher and myself, but others of the Mier prisoners, I lost not a moment in writing to my friends in Texas for evidence of his falsehood. I had too much respect for his personal and political astuteness to believe that he did not know what that letter would produce, and I knew that such official authority was the highest upon which the President of Mexico could desire to act. The evidence I wrote for to Texas came in due season, such as not only satisfied the United States minister, but even Santa Anna himself, of Houston's falsehood; and, without tiring the [217] reader here with a recital of this melancholy, cruel, bloody tragedy, I refer him to the proofs of all that I have said in a correspondence published soon after my escape from prison in Mexico. (See Appendix No. VI.)14

This evening William Reese visited General Thompson, the United States minister in Mexico,15 where this melancholy information of our prisoners was confirmed. The nights at this season of the year in Mexico are cold, and though there were hundreds of unoccupied rooms in this building, we were compelled to quarter upon the pavement in the open court with our thin blankets. We suffered much in body, but the anguish of mind was far beyond all bodily sufferance. To be butchered by wholesale as national marauders, by the perfidious, horrible decree of our own President, without the means of proving to the world his heinous falsehood, was to us a mental torment far worse than death itself.

March 16th. Mr. Cursin, Captain West, and several other friends came in to