the lights of these and the brigandish appearance of those who keep them are very unlike anything one may see at home. All that the city really needs now is a good hotel and a more proper pride in its history and the monuments to it. The man who seems to appreciate this best is William Corner, whose book on San Antonio is a most valuable historical authority. A few years ago one would have said that San Antonio was enjoying a boom. But you cannot use that expression now, for the Western men have heard that a boom, no matter how quickly it rises, often comes down just as quickly, and so forcibly that it makes a hole in the ground where castles in the air had formerly stood. So if you wish to please a Western man by speaking well of his city (and you cannot please him more in any other way), you must say that it is enjoying a “steady, healthy growth.” San Antonio is enjoying a steady, healthy growth. It is quite as impossible to write comprehensively of south-western Texas in one article as it is to write such an article and say nothing of the Alamo. And the Alamo, in the event of any hasty reader’s possible objection, is not ancient history. It is no more ancient history than love is an old story, for nothing is ancient and nothing is old which every new day teaches something that is fine and beautiful and brave. The Alamo is to the South-west what Independence Hall is to the United States, and Bunker Hill to the East; but the pride of it belongs to every American, whether he lives in Texas or in Maine. The battle of the Alamo was the event of greatest moment in the war between Mexico and the Texans, when Santa Anna was President, and the Texans were fighting for their independence. And the stone building to which the Mexicans laid siege, and in which the battle was fought, stands to-day facing a plaza in the centre of San Antonio. There are hideous wooden structures around it, and others not so hideous--modern hotels and the new Post-office, on which the mortar is hardly yet dry. But in spite of these the grace and dignity which the monks gave it in 1774, raise it above these modern efforts that tower above it, and dwarf them. They are collecting somewhat slowly a fund to pay for the erection of a monument to the heroes of the Alamo. As though they needed a monument, with these battered walls still standing and the marks of the bullets on the casements! No architect can build better than that. No architect can introduce that feature. The architects of the Alamo were building the independence of a State as wide in its boundaries as the German Empire. The story of the Alamo is a more than thrice-told one, and Sidney Lanier has told it so well that whoever would write of it must draw on him for much of their material, and must accept his point of view. But it cannot be told too often, even though it is spoiled in the telling.