bishop's palace at Tacubaya; and what was still more grating to their feelings was to be gazed upon from their coaches by the yellow, pepper-eating, demi-savages, as if they had been so many hyenas. We trace most of the survivors, naked and emaciated, two hundred miles east, to the dark, cold dungeons of Perote; the balance to San Juan de Ulloa, to be offered up as a certain sacrifice to the vomito, that universal malaria of death. We follow around the massive castle walls of Perote upon the north, and in the bottom of the great ditch find newly-stirred earth. Here, underneath the loose sand, without a plank to cover their bones or a stone to mark the place - without the last sad rites of burial, in a spot not only unconsecrated, but cursed by a fanatical priesthood, lie the remains of the best spirits of our country. Here, in a foreign land, in a priest-ridden nation, and in full view of the eternal snows of Orazaba, repose the bones of fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons of Texians - here we helped to deposite [371] Booker and Jackson, Trapnal and Crews, Saunders, Gray, Trimble, and a long list of others.5 Peace to their ashes, and a nation's gratitude to their memories! But oh! how the heart sickens at perfidy the most unparalleled, when we trace these bloody murders, starvation, and deaths to the President of our own country! I would to God that a due regard to truth, as well as justice to the memories of these brave men, would allow me to throw the mantle of eternal darkness over the sequel; if so, I would bury this most horrible conclusion in lasting oblivion, for my country's credit. It is, however, my task to register this bloody tale, and I have no option but in truth; and when President Houston has been charged as the cause of the sufferings and murder of our countrymen, for our country's honour it has been too clearly proven. (See Appendix Nos. II. and VI.)

We still look after the surviving half of the brave band of Mier, and find them in the cheerless cells of Perote, living skeletons, without clothing enough to hide their nakedness; and what language do we hear from them? Though they feel mortified and indignant at their president's denunciation of them, and his heartless usurpation of the laws of their Congress in withholding their supplies, yet there is but one sentiment, one language among them, and that is, "The honour and liberty of their country." At all times, all occasions, and under all circumstances, when hunger has pressed them most, when [372] Death made no sham visits to their gloomy abodes, boldly did they publish this sentiment. Time after time did they write home to their countrymen, "Let no consideration of us forfeit your country's honour. Let us rot in these dungeons ere you concede one inch to these coloured barbarians." And when there was one recreant slave among them, who fostered a coward and a traitor's heart so servile as to beg his liberty at his country's dishonour, he was denounced by the others with universal execrations.*

I believe that I may safely assert, from my intimate knowledge of the Mier

* This was "the lawyer Robinson," one of the Bexar prisoners, whom Santa Anna despatched to Texas to bring her back to acknowledge the "supremacy of Mexico."