ee what further sufferings
were to come, to fill up the measure of the punishment which, for some
mysterious purpose, the faithful must endure. But when close upon
all this discomfiture and humiliation of her Church followed the
discomfiture and humiliation of her country in war, and the near and
evident danger of an English-speaking people's possessing the land,
all the smothered fire of the Senora's nature broke out afresh. With
unfaltering hands she buckled on her husband's sword, and with dry eyes
saw him go forth to fight. She had but one regret, that she was not the
mother of sons to fight also.

"Would thou wert a man, Felipe," she exclaimed again and again in tones
the child never forgot. "Would thou wert a man, that thou might go also
to fight these foreigners!"

Any race under the sun would have been to the Senora less hateful than
the American. She had scorned them in her girlhood, when they came
trading to post after post. She scorned them still. The idea of being
forced to wage a war with pedlers was to her too monstrous to be
believed. In the outset she had no doubt that the Mexicans would win in
the contest.

"What!" she cried, "shall we who won independence from Spain, be beaten
by these traders? It is impossible!"

When her husband was brought home to her dead, killed in the last fight
the Mexican forces made, she said icily, "He would have chosen to die
rather than to have been forced to see his country in the hands of
the enemy." And she was almost frightened at herself to see how this
thought, as it dwelt in her mind, slew the grief in her heart. She had
believed she could not live if her husband were to be taken away from
her; but she found herself often glad that he was dead,--glad that he
was spared the sight and the knowledge of the things which happened;
and even the yearning tenderness with which her imagination pictured
him among the saints, was often turned into a fierce wondering whether
indignation did not fill his soul, even in heaven, at the way things
were going in the land for whose sake he had died.

Out of such throes as these had been born the second nature which made
Senora Moreno the silent, reserved, stern, implacable woman they knew,
who knew her first when she was sixty. Of the gay, tender, sentimental
girl, who danced and laughed with the officers, and prayed and confessed
with the Fathers, forty years before, there was small trace left now,
in the low-voiced, white-haire