weather during the passage, we landed at New-Orleans on the eighth day, at 11 P.M. With feelings which do not often occur in one's life, we once more leaped upon freedom's soil; and as we required neither clearance or porters, we wended our way up town, and called into the first open "drinkery."

Here the scene changed. These very men, I among the rest, who, a few short weeks before, would have given a pint of their blood for a gill of the most miserable brandy ever distilled, now want, one a "sherry cobbler," one a "Tom and Jerry," and another a "hail storm," and all concluded that a little rose water round the edge of the cut glass would make it go the better. How comparative is human happiness!

Having taken our drink, we passed on to the St. Charles Hotel, and called for a bed each with the most Republican independence. The barkeeper, on ringing for the servant to show us rooms, seemed to be impressed with some of the steward's misgivings, and as we started off, said, "Gentlemen, it is a rule of the house to pay in advance for tumbling the beds." We replied, "All right, landlord: we are a [369] suspicious-looking set," and threw him a dollar each. The next day Colonels Wm. M. Beal and Durochea generously gave me money to ration my comrades, and in two days after we were again upon the "deep blue sea" with Captain Furgarson, sailing for the "Lone Star."

The sixth day we landed off the Brazos, where, soon after, Captain Reese and Dan were taken down with the severest kind of fever, which they had contracted at Vera Cruz, and with great difficulty recovered from, while my fellow-citizens elected me to the more pleasant excitement of the Congress Hall. Reese has since married a charming lady, and is making cotton-bales upon the banks of Cedar Lake; while Dan, true to his first promise, is again upon the Mexican frontier with Captain Hays, ready to take his change out of the "blanketed nation."4

Let us now turn to inquire after the main body of our countrymen-prisoners; and we do so with feelings of mournful sorrow, with a heart overwhelmed with sadness. We go back to the prisons of San Luis Potosi, and find them covered with rags and filth, loaded with vermin, and worn down with hunger and all the multiplied cruelties of their captors. We trace their bloody path south three hundred miles, through the scorching plains of Mexico, by the unburied bones of many noble souls who sunk under a task more than human. We see the brave and dauntless Cameron taken out upon this path and murdered for no other cause than his bravery. [370] We see the remainder herded together like beasts of burden, and driven forth into the streets with sticks and bayonets by brutal overseers, as scavengers of filth too horrible to contemplate. We see their manly frames worn down by an insufficient allowance of the offal of a rotten population. As the opposite plate [see plate facing page 177] will show, which was drawn from life by our indefatigable fellow-prisoner, Charles M'Laughlin, we see them heavily ironed, working upon a pavement in front of the archbishop's