25th of March, the main body of the survivors were marched on the road to the capital, a distance of five hundred miles, under sufferings the most cruel, which killed several; and many others, being unable to travel, were left in the hospitals of San Luis Potosi, Dolores, and San Juan del Rio, from which miserable sinks but few ever returned. It would be swelling this journal beyond all reasonable bounds to detail the actual suffering of these men; indeed, language would give the reader but a poor idea of these sad recollections. Thus, after thirty days' march, they arrived at the village of Huehuetoca, seven leagues from the city of Mexico, where they were all crowded together in a room too small to permit of their lying down, and into which not a breath of air could enter when the door was closed. In a very little time the air became so impure, from the exhaustion of the oxygen, that the [284] candles went out, and respiration became exceedingly difficult. They in vain appealed to the guards at the door to let in fresh air, and when death the most cruel stared them wholesale in the face, as a last alternative they had recourse to cutting holes in the door with their pocket knives, and alternately breathing at these small orifices.

This was, indeed, as the Mexican soldiers called it, la noche triste, "the sad night." Their march of many leagues the day before, through an insufferable dust, a burning sun, the want of food and water, and then at night not even space sufficient of the stone floor to lie upon, and a suffocating atmosphere to breathe, was not their full measure of woe. About eight o'clock at night a menial murderer, with a pair of epaulets upon his shoulders, and a guard of about one dozen mounted men, under broad-brimmed hats, arrived with orders from the tyrant Santa Anna to shoot the bold and beloved Captain Ewin Cameron.

Captain Cameron was unchained from his partner, Colonel Wm. F. Wilson, and, with his interpreter, Alfred Thurmond, taken out of prison, and kept under a separate guard until morning; and when informed that he was to be shot, wrote a manly and dignified letter of remonstrance to the British minister against such a cold-blooded murder of a national enemy and a British subject. The writer regrets his inability as yet to be able to procure this last letter.

The next morning, after our men were marched for the city of Mexico, he was taken out in the rear [285] of the village to the place of execution [see plate facing page 113]. A priest, the usual attendant of Mexican executions, was in waiting, and when he was asked if he wished to confess to the father, he promptly answered, "No! throughout life I believe that I have lived an upright man, and if I have to confess it shall be to my Maker." His arms were then tied with a cord at the elbows and drawn back, and when the guard advanced to bandage his eyes, he said to his interpreter, "Tell them no! Ewin Cameron can now, as he has often done before for the liberty of Texas, look death in the face without winking." So saying, he threw his hat and blanket upon the ground, opened the bosom of his hunting-shirt, presented his naked breast, and gave the word "Fire!" when his noble soul in a twinkling