the finest sorts and most delicious flavour.

At Brazoria, my friend and myself had the satisfaction of learning that
our land-certificates, for which we had each paid a thousand dollars, were
worth exactly nothing--just so much waste paper, in short--unless we chose
to conform to a condition to which our worthy friends, the Galveston Bay
and Texas Land Company, had never made the smallest allusion.

It appeared that in the year 1824, the Mexican Congress had passed an act
for the encouragement of emigration from the United States to Texas. In
consequence of this act, an agreement was entered into with contractors,
or _empresarios_, as they call them in Mexico, who had bound themselves to
bring a certain number of settlers into Texas within a given time and
without any expense to the Mexican government. On the other hand, the
Mexican government had engaged to furnish land to these emigrants at the
rate of five square leagues to every hundred families; but to this
agreement one condition was attached, and it was, that all settlers should
be, or become, Roman Catholics. Failing this, the validity of their claims
to the land was not recognised, and they were liable to be turned out any
day at the point of the bayonet.

This information threw us into no small perplexity. It was clear that we
had been duped, completely bubbled, by the rascally Land Company; that, as
heretics, the Mexican government would have nothing to say to us; and that,
unless we chose to become converts to the Romish Church, we might whistle
for our acres, and light our pipes with the certificate. Our Yankee
friends at Brazoria, however, laughed at our dilemma, and told us that we
were only in the same plight as hundreds of our countrymen, who had come
to Texas in total ignorance of this condition, but who had not the less
taken possession of their land and settled there; that they themselves