Early the next morning, Walker and Crocker, accompanied by Col. Ramirez and Capt. Doubleday, an American who had served in the Democratic army during the siege of Granada, started for Leon. As they entered the town of Chinandega the church bells rang a welcome peal, and at all the villages on the road they received marks of good will and hospitality. The road from Chinandega to Leon, by Chichigalpa and Posultega, passes through a country for which nature has done much and man little; and the effect of even what little man had done was marred by the constant signs of revolutionary violence. Under the shade of the magnificent ceiba might be seen halted a company of soldiers with their trowsers rolled above their knees; but on close observation you could perceive that the sergeants and corporals were keenly watching lest some of their new recruits might take advantage of the halt to slip away for a moment, and so escape the hated service. It was a relief to turn from man and his works to the nature brilliant with beauties in her tropical aspects. As the travellers approached Leon they beheld spread out before them a vast plain which seems almost boundless in extent as you look toward the south; while gazing northward, you perceive the lofty line of volcanoes—Viejo on one flank and Momotombo on the other—stretching from the Gulf of Fonseca to the Lake of Managua. It is only when you ascend the tower of the cathedral within the city, and are able to distinguish to the westward the ocean through the break in the coast range of hills, that you see the southern wall of the plain made by the mountains around the town of Managua. But it was not to muse over nature or to admire her vast and grand proportions in these southern latitudes, that the companions of the swarthy Ramirez had come to Central America. The sight of the picket on the outskirt of the town, though at least three quarters of a league from the Plaza, was more suggestive of the objects they had in view; and riding rapidly through the lanes and streets they soon reached the house of the Provisional Director. Castellon received the new-comers with frank cordiality, and expressed the lively pleasure he felt at their arrival. It did not require many minutes to see that he was not the man to control a revolutionary movement, or to conduct it to a successful issue. There was a certain indecision, not merely in his words and features, but even in his walk and the general motions of his body; and this trait of character seemed to be aggravated by the circumstances about him. A short conversation revealed his anxiety that Walker should meet Muñoz; and Castellon said at once that he needed the military assistance of the Americans to secure the success of the Provisional Government. He said he wished them to enter the service as a separate corps, and proposed to call them _La Falange Americana_—the American Phalanx.