he protection of
American commerce from aggressions in that quarter. Arriving at the
mouth of the Orinoco, he shifted his flag to the Nonsuch, and ascended
the river to the capital, Angostura, where he remained twenty days
transacting his business, in the height of the yellow-fever season.
His vessel had hardly left the river, on her way to Trinidad, when he
was attacked. For nearly a week he suffered the progress of the
terrible disease on board the small schooner, under a tropical sun,
when he reached the station whither he had sent his flag-ship, the
Adams. But he reached port only to die at sea, within a mile of the
anchorage, on August 23, 1819, when he had just completed his
thirty-fourth year. Such and so early was the fate of the gallant
Perry. His remains were interred from the John Adams at Port Spain,
with every attention by the English governor. Subsequently they were
brought home in a national vessel by order of Congress, and
reinterred at the public expense in the cemetery at Newport. The
country also provided for the support of his family. If ever America
produced a man whom the nation delighted to honor it was Perry.

SAM HOUSTON[7]

By AMELIA E. BARR

(1793-1863)

[Footnote 7: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]

[Illustration: Sam Houston. [TN]]

The builders of the American Commonwealth were all great and
individual men, but the most grandly picturesque, the most heroic,
figure among them, is that of General Sam Houston. Neither modern
history, nor the scrolls of ancient Greece or Rome, can furnish a tale
of glory more thrilling and stirring than the epic Sam Houston wrote
with sword and pen, as a Conqueror of Tyranny and a Liberator of Men.

His life is a romance, and even his antecedents have the grandeur and
glamour of military glory, for his ancestors, as "Sons of Old Gaul,"
had drawn their long swords in every battle for Scottish liberty, and
his own father died while on military duty in the Alleghanies. He had
also a mother worthy of the son she bore; a grand, brave woman, who
put the musket into his boyish hands with the words, "My doors are
ever open to the brave, Sam, but are eternally closed to cowards."

This was in the year 1813, when there was promise of a war with
England, and Sam was not then twenty years old--a tall, slender,
wonderfully handsome youth, with the air and manner of a prince. But
nothing of this bearing was due to schools or schoolmasters, he was