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A HAPPY TRUCE.
"Well, honor is the subject of my story; I cannot tell what you and other men Think of this life; but for my single self, I had as lief not be, as live to be In awe of such a thing as I myself." "Two truths are told As happy prologues to the swelling act, Of the imperial theme." "This is the eve of Christmas, No sleep from night to morn; The Virgin is in travail, At twelve will the Child be born." Cities have not only a certain physiognomy; they have also a decided mental and moral character, and a definite political tendency.

There are good and bad cities, artistic and commercial cities, scholarly and manufacturing cities, aristocratic and radical cities.

San Antonio, in its political and social character, was a thoroughly radical city.
Its population, composed in a large measure of adventurous units from various nationalities, had that fluid rather than fixed character, which is susceptible to new ideas.

For they were generally men who had found the restraints of the centuries behind them to be intolerable--men to whom freedom was the grand ideal of life.
It maybe easily undertood{sic} that this element in the population of San Antonio was a powerful one, and that a little of such leaven would stir into activity a people who, beneath the crust of their formal piety, had still something left of that pride and adventurous spirit which distinguished the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel.
In fact, no city on the American continent has such a bloody record as San Antonio.