to feast themselves. What rendered the beef the more intolerable was, that the night previous to the morning on which they were butchered, these poor old grandmothers were brought into the castle, and tied to a certain post at our prison door, where we could all see and pity them. Our boys would gather round these poor old creatures, count the rings upon their horns, and ascertain their years accordingly. One of the animals numbered seventeen rings: she was nearly blind from age, and would roll her glassy eyeballs around upon her heathen spectators with the demure and quiet gravity of appeal as to what the strange procedure portended. Jake, a heretic brave, who has followed cattle long upon the Texian prairies, and was deeply versed in cow-ology, knew well her meaning. Though Jake had killed his score of Mexicans with less compunction of conscience than if they had been so many vipers, he was [266] deeply affected; his heart swelled with emotion, till, with a choked utterance, he turned from the scene, exclaiming, "Boys, she looks so much like my poor old grandmother in Texas, I'll be sworn if I taste a mouthful of her!"

On another occasion, when one of these venerable mothers had laid herself down to die, having been snake-bitten on the neck, which caused a swelling even to a larger size than her body, and rendered the poor creature wholly unable to stand upon her feet, she was in that condition packed into the castle upon hand-sticks. In remonstrating against such an atrocity, the only satisfaction we obtained was a surly reply; for, after the old fellow had reared back into one of his semicircle attitudes, in a most complacent manner, after a deep and thoughtful look, with his right hand upon his chin, and his fore finger pointing up above his mouth, he said, "Well, I'll not give you the snake-bitten part."

We had our revenge upon this old brute by caricaturing him upon the castle walls, to the great amusement of his brother officers. We had a prisoner with us, a German, by the name of Voos,3 about whom a book of stirring incidents might be written. Voos was the man who, in 1835, fresh from Germany, and on his way to join our liberty army, rode smack into San Antonio when the Texians lay before that place, and asked for the Texian general's headquarters, when he was shown into [267] the calaboose by General Coss; he was subsequently taken prisoner with Colonel Fannin, and escaped that horrible massacre by passing himself off as a physician, being retained to heal the wounded. He has since seen a great deal of frontier service, and been in many Indian fights: he is a man of education, and has a fine taste for drawing. Upon the sunshiny side of the walls of our prison, Voos, with charcoal, could give a lifelike sketch of the corpulent individual so frequently referred to. On one occasion he made him fishing up the beef's bowels from our cook's kettle upon a flesh-fork, saying, "These are very good guts, Texians," The likeness was so good that all the Mexican officers recognised it, and the more they laughed, the more towering Guts's passion rose, until serious fears were entertained of an explosion of his ire.