The romancer has an incontestable advantage over the historian. Not being obliged to restrict himself to historical documents, he bases his work chiefly on tradition, and revels in those incidents of private life disdained by cold and severe history, which is constrained to describe only great events, and is not permitted to descend to the frequently trivial causes which not only prepared, but actually brought them about. Frequently, after a long journey, the traveller, fatigued by the vast horizons incessantly unrolled before him, and rendered giddy by the sharp air of the elevations along which he has been riding, looks down on the plain, and his eye rests with indescribable pleasure on those modest points in the landscape which at the outset he despised. In the same way the romancer halts at the familiar episodes of the great poem, and listens to the simple stories told him by those who were actors in the scenes merely indicated by history. Such stories complete the dry and stern narrative of great wars, but historians dare not transcribe them. It is true that in these stories ignorance is nearly always perceptible, and prejudice very frequently; but life is found in them, for if the narrators tell inexactly what happened, they at any rate say frankly how they felt, what they heard and saw themselves, and the errors they sometimes involuntarily make are not falsehoods, but relative truths, which it is the duty of the romancer to classify and put in their proper place. We have several times visited the narrow defile where the Border Rifles and the Mexicans fought the action we described in a previous volume.[1] Bending over the precipice, with our eyes fixed on the yawning abyss beneath us, we heard the narrative of the strange incidents of that battle of giants, and if we had not been certain of the veracity of the narrator, we should certainly have not only doubted but completely denied the possibility of certain facts which are, however, rigorously true, and which we are now about to impart to the reader. The Border Rifles saw with a shriek of horror the two men, intertwined like serpents, roll together over the precipice; the flashes of the fire, which was beginning to die out for want of nourishment, after devastating the crests of the hills, threw at intervals a lurid light over this scene, and gave it a striking aspect.