This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: .nowwithin rhe reach of their sound, Houston was anxiously waiting for the expected signal. The day before, like many preceding it, a dull rumbling murmur had come booming over the prairie like distant thunder.

He listened with an acuteness of sense, which no man can understand whose hearing has not been sharpened by the teachings of the dwellers of the forest, and who is awaiting a signal of life or death from brave men. He listened in vain. Not the faintest murmur came floating on the calm air. He knew the Alamo had fallen, and he returned to tell his companions. The event confirmed his conviction, for the Alamo had fired its last gun the morning he left Washington; and at the very moment he was speaking in the convention those brave men were meeting their fate. ' On the 12th of March, about eight o clock in the evening, Mrs. Dickinson arrived with her child at General Houston s camp, accompanied by two negro guides, sent to attend her by Santa Anna, and also to bring a proclamation of pardon to the insurgent colonists, if they would lay down their arms. The proclamation was, of course, treated as such papers had been by our fathers, when they were sent to their camps of sufiering by generals of a British king.

Mrs. Dickinson was the wife of one of the brave oflicers whose bones had crumbled on the-sacrificial pyre of the Alamo. Houston was walking alone, a few hun dred yards from camp, at the moment this stricken and bereaved 'messenger arrived. He returned soon after, and found that her fearful narrative of the butchering and burning, with some of the most stirring details of that dark tragedy, had already struck the soldiers with a chill of horror; and when she told them that 5,000 men were advancing by forced inarches, .