A strong force was quickly within the streets of the city, assailed by skirmishers firing from houses and gardens, who could be reached only by forcing a way in with pickaxes and bars. Two guns were brought in by Worth’s column and planted in position to batter down the San Cosmé gate, the barrier to the great square in the city’s centre, and which fronted the cathedral and palace. Quitman and Shields had to fight their way through as hot a fire, and as they charged inward found themselves before the citadel, mounting fifteen guns. At this point a severe loss was sustained, but the assailants held their own, mounting guns to attack the citadel the next morning. These guns were not used. Before daylight a deputation of the city council waited on General Scott and announced that the army had evacuated the city, and the government officials had fled. It was not long afterwards before the Stars and Stripes were floating over the National Palace and in the great plaza. Fighting continued for a day longer between the Americans and about four thousand soldiers and liberated convicts, who fought with desperate fury for their country and were not put down without considerable loss. On the morning of September 16 the army of the United States held undisputed possession of the famous old capital of Mexico. Fighting continued, however, elsewhere for some months later, and it was not till the 2d of February, 1848, that a treaty of peace was signed. WALKER THE FILIBUSTER, AND THE INVASION OF NICARAGUA. On the 15th of October, 1853, a small and daring band of reckless adventurers sailed from San Francisco, on an enterprise seemingly madder and wilder than that which Cortez had undertaken more than three centuries before. The purpose of this handful of men—filibusters they were called, as lawless in their way as the buccaneers of old—was the conquest of Northwest Mexico; possibly in the end of all Mexico and Central America. No one knows what wild vagaries filled the mind of William Walker, their leader, "the gray-eyed man of destiny," as his admirers called him. Landing at La Paz, in the southwestern corner of the Gulf of California, with his few companions, he captured a number of hamlets and then grandiloquently proclaimed Lower California an independent state and himself its president. His next proclamation "annexed" to his territory the large Mexican state of Sonora, on the mainland opposite the California Gulf, and for a brief period he posed among the sparse inhabitants as a ruler. Some reinforcements reached him by water, but another party that started overland was dispersed by starvation, their food giving out.