A CONTRAST.
giving the explanation just in time to save himself and party from being overwhelmed by the hot-headed impetuosity of their heroes. They shook before his eyes the lances which had been taken from the rash and unlucky Comanches, and showed how they had been bent like reeds before the tempest-track of the wrath they had provoked. They were then winding up by impressing upon him, in reiterations, the high sense of gratitude he ought to entertain and express towards the " Blessed Virgin," for her mercy in permitting him to come under the shrJtdow of iheir formidable power as allies, not leaving him and his nation exposed, as the wretched and outcast Comanches were, to the tornadoes of Mexican ire ! This rather capped the climax of any display I had yet witnessed of the surprising powers of Master Antone.
Just picture to yourself the tall, erect, and martial form of the Indian warrior; and then, a few paces in front of him, the shrivelled figure of Antone, standing in his stirrups, leaning forward, in his eagerness, over the horse's neck ; his hat off, his lean, yellow face upturned, his chin and long sharp nose pointing to the zenith, his little black eyes glowing, his wide mouth clattering like a mill-clapper, every sentence
'                                 " A bombast circumstance,
Horribly stuffed with epithets of war,"
enforced by his rapid gesticulation; changing the lance from one hand to the other; now making it sing again, as he whirled it in the air; now striking it fiercely against the saddle. He even forgot his old enemy, the Texan, so intensely was he absorbed in bearing down poor Castro to the very earth by the torrent of his eloquence; when, suddenly, a lance from that same merciless hand was so sharply thrust into his posterior, that—biting a word in two—the pain caused him to make a convulsive spring which carried him over his horse's head, and landed him most ignominiously on his nose, in the burrow of a sand-rat, amidst a simultaneous roar of laughter, in which even the stoical warriors joined.
Davis retreated very suddenly; and as the chop-fallen knave gathered himself up, sputtering the blood and sand from his mouth,