ringing up his flat-boats to the sides of the muddy
causeways, or in cutting off the supplies of provisions by water, or in
breaking down the earthen aqueduct of Chapultepec, so that the Indians
were finally subdued by the combined forces of hunger and thirst. When,
the Aztecs were so enfeebled by want that they could no longer offer
resistance, the Spaniards rushed into the town, seized the unresisting
Guatemozin, and shouted victory.

INDIAN WARFARE.

It requires a familiarity with Spanish character, and the Moorish,
Oriental origin of their literature, in order to read Spanish-American
military annals understandingly, as much so as it does a knowledge of
Indian character in order to sift out the truth from accounts of Indian
wars. The superstitious dread which the Aztecs at all times evinced for
the Spanish horses and horsemen is common to all savages.[49] The
appearance of two or three horses, kept ready for that purpose, was
sufficient to restore the battle after the Spaniards had taken to their
heels. And while the facts of the siege amount to little more than
keeping possession of the narrow causeways, by aid of superior
implements of war, until famine and thirst had done their work, yet the
Spanish histories of the Conquest make it to surpass in interest, and
in the magnitude of forces engaged, almost any siege on record. And so
plausibly is the narrative written, that the reader drinks it in with
breathless anxiety, without once stopping to ask himself how so many
hundreds of thousands of Indians could be fed in a salt valley,
inclosed by high mountains, without the aid of a regularly organized
commissariat department, or how such masses of undisciplined Indians
could be manoeuvred upon a narrow causeway, where numbers add no
strength, but only tend to augment the confusion--where, as in this
case, there had to be a daily advance and retreat in presence of an
active enemy.

IMPROBABILITY OF CORTEZ'S ACCOUNT.

The interesting note which we have copied describes an event within the
memory of the present generation. And it is well recollected what
trepidation was caused in that colony of the British Empire by the
approach to the frontier of a nation of barbarians who despised fear,
whose religion was war, and who knew no sin like that of turning the
back to any enemy. Yet a hundred horsemen, with firearms, from a
missionary village, unaccustomed to war, were sufficient to turn back
this mighty host of bra