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.