When the rebellion began, General Sam Houston, who had been president of Texas when it was a republic, was governor of the State. In common with the overwhelming majority of the people, Houston was utterly hostile to Secession. With them he knew too well what Texas had been and how it had come into the Union. There was a certain grand inertia of the great State which resisted the noisy efforts of South Carolina to drag it out, as a stately ship resists, of itself and although its crew be passive, the attempts of a little tug to tow it along. Not one-fourth of the people of the State voted, when the test came, for Secession, and no man opposed it more determinedly than did its governor. If, like Texas among the States, he towered among men, almost a giant in stature and breadth of person, like Texas also he was peculiar every way. It required men of marked individuality to settle the country, to wrest it from Mexico, to erect it into a republic; and no Texan was more emphatically "himself and nobody else" than was the ponderous chief magistrate. Manifold stories illustrative of this are still afloat there: let one suffice, even if it shows also the weakness of the man. One morning when he was president of the republic the envoy from France called to confer with him upon an affair of critical importance. The executive mansion was but a log-cabin boarding-house at the time, and the only thing to be done was for the portly president to promenade up and down the long porch in front of the building, the envoy, who was the most polished and nervous of Frenchmen, walking by his side. But a small nurse-girl was engaged in drawing a screaming baby upon the porch in a roughly-constructed child's wagon. When he passed it the president said, with the politeness which always characterized him when anything female was in question, "Will you be so kind as to roll your charge somewhere else?" The nurse merely stared at him, and continued to drag the squalling infant up and down upon the squeaking wheels, the president and the envoy conferring together as well as they could as they walked. "My young friend," the former remonstrated at last as he halted before the girl, "I will esteem it a singular favor if you will go elsewhere." But it was little the nurse cared for the affairs of empires, and she paid no attention to the request. It so chanced that when the rival occupants of the porch passed each other the next time it was opposite the steep steps leading down into the yard, the Frenchman being upon that side. As the president came upon the rolling nuisance, now noisier than before, he whirled about. "I had rather," he shouted to the astonished girl, his face ablaze, his arms extended, "meet all hell in harness, and be dragged down the streets of the New Jerusalem by wild horses, than meet your horrible cart!" and, glancing around for his companion, he saw that in the violence of his explosion he had hurled the represented