It requires a familiarity with Spanish character, and the Moorish, Oriental origin of their literature, in order to read Spanish-American military annals understandingly, as much so as it does a knowledge of Indian character in order to sift out the truth from accounts of Indian wars. The superstitious dread which the Aztecs at all times evinced for the Spanish horses and horsemen is common to all savages.[49] The appearance of two or three horses, kept ready for that purpose, was sufficient to restore the battle after the Spaniards had taken to their heels. And while the facts of the siege amount to little more than keeping possession of the narrow causeways, by aid of superior implements of war, until famine and thirst had done their work, yet the Spanish histories of the Conquest make it to surpass in interest, and in the magnitude of forces engaged, almost any siege on record. And so plausibly is the narrative written, that the reader drinks it in with breathless anxiety, without once stopping to ask himself how so many hundreds of thousands of Indians could be fed in a salt valley, inclosed by high mountains, without the aid of a regularly organized commissariat department, or how such masses of undisciplined Indians could be manoeuvred upon a narrow causeway, where numbers add no strength, but only tend to augment the confusion--where, as in this case, there had to be a daily advance and retreat in presence of an active enemy. IMPROBABILITY OF CORTEZ'S ACCOUNT. The interesting note which we have copied describes an event within the memory of the present generation. And it is well recollected what trepidation was caused in that colony of the British Empire by the approach to the frontier of a nation of barbarians who despised fear, whose religion was war, and who knew no sin like that of turning the back to any enemy. Yet a hundred horsemen, with firearms, from a missionary village, unaccustomed to war, were sufficient to turn back this mighty host of brave savages. It can not be claimed that the Aztecs were superior to these Mantatees, or that the force of Cortez was inferior in equipment to the hundred unwarlike Griquas whose "thunder and lightning" (as they termed the musketry) drove them back. The missionary was a Protestant, a man of truth, and had no glory to win, and therefore told only the simple truth. Cortez, out of a much inferior affair, has fabricated a romance, with such verisimilitude that he has astonished the world by an account of achievements which he never performed. To write well is nine tenths of a hero; and in the time of Cortez, as it is even now at Mexico, it was the easiest thing imaginable to manufacture an astonishing victory out of the very smallest amount of material. If no lives were lost in the battle, so much more astounding is the victory. This practice of sacrificing human life is only a modification of cannibalism, and the very mission on