Houston is no better than a Jew, and perhaps
very ugly beside. Let us talk no more about him and the Americans. I
am weary of them; as Tia Rachella says, 'they have their spoon in every
one's mess.'"

And Antonia, whose heart was burning, only stooped down and closed her
sister's pretty mouth with a kiss. Her tongue was impatient to speak for
the father, and grandmother, and the friends, so dear to her; but she
possessed great discretion, and also a large share of that rarest of all
womanly graces, the power under provocation, of "putting on Patience the
noble."

CHAPTER III. BUILDERS OF THE COMMONWEALTH.

"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing
herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her
invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her
mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eye in the full mid-day beam."
--MILTON.

"And from these grounds, concluding as we doe,
Warres causes diuerse, so by consequence
Diuerse we must conclude their natures too:
For war proceeding from Omnipotence,
No doubt is holy, wise, and without error;
The sword, of justice and of sin, the terror."
--LORD BROOKE.

It is the fashion now to live for the present but the men of fifty
years ago, the men who builded the nation, they reverenced the past, and
therefore they could work for the future. As Robert Worth rode through
the streets of San Antonio that afternoon, he was thinking, not of his
own life, but of his children's and of the generations which should come
after them.

The city was flooded with sunshine, and crowded with a pack-train going
to Sonora; the animals restlessly protesting against the heat and flies;
their Mexican drivers in the pulqueria, spending their last peso with
their compadres, or with the escort of soldiers which was to accompany
them--a little squad of small, lithe men, with round, yellow, beardless
faces, bearing in a singular degree the stamp of being native to
the soil. Their lieutenant, a gorgeously clad officer with a very
distinguished air, was coming slowly down the street to join them. He
bowed, and smiled pleasantly to the doctor as he passed him, and then
in a few moments the word of command and the shouting of men and the
clatter of hoofs invaded the enchanted atmosphere like an insult.

But the tumult scarcely jarred with the thoughts of his mind. They
had bee