Walker had seen enough of his new friends to convince him that his ambition had nothing to fear from such rivals. Castellon was an amiable and irresolute gentleman; Munoz was ambitious and vain, but incapable. The native soldiery were ill-trained and fickle-minded. Faction had stifled any faint sparks of patriotism in their breasts. A few hundred of them who bore the proud title of _veteranos_, had smelt powder and could face an enemy after a march of forty miles under a tropical sun. They wore a tasteful uniform and carried muskets and knapsacks. But the hundred recruits of Ramirez were a Falstaffian corps of indolent, good-natured rascals, who devoted all the intervals between skirmishing to gambling and gossip. As their country's proverb hath it, "they would gamble away the sun before sunrise." In striking contrast with those children of nature were the men of California, with iron nerves and dauntless courage, in whose characters vice lost half its evil by losing, if not its grossness, all its meanness; men who "deemed no crime, or curse, or vice as dark as that of cowardice." Their manliness was incapable of treachery, falsehood, or the meaner passions, born of a society in which law, the only remedy for wrong, too easily becomes the strongest shield of the wrong-doer. Having summed up their virtues in the comprehensive ones of courage and loyalty, there is little else to be said in their favour. For themselves they would have asked no higher praise, and strict justice can accord them little beyond. It was a bold move to attack the enemy in his stronghold. Rivas and the adjoining country are the most densely populated parts of Nicaragua. The city of Rivas contains eleven thousand inhabitants, while the department of that name and the adjacent Oriental department number respectively twenty thousand and ninety-five thousand. Four days after leaving Realejo, the party, to the number of one hundred and sixty-five landed at a point on the coast near the town of Brito, and immediately began a forced march to Rivas. Midnight and a severe rain storm overtook them in the midst of a strange country, but they trudged patiently along, ankle-deep in mud, shielding their precious ammunition from the falling torrents. On the second night of their march the weather proved a useful ally, enabling them to surprise and overpower a picket of the enemy at the village of Tola. Next morning they were rewarded by a first sight of Lake Nicaragua in all its matchless beauty. Walker, who had beheld the glories of Switzerland, Italy, and California, pauses in the recital of his dangerous adventures to note the charms of the earthly paradise upon which he had come to launch the horrors of war. Between him and the lake six hundred Legitimist's troops lay at Rivas, awaiting the attack.