e of Christmas,
No sleep from night to morn;
The Virgin is in travail,
At twelve will the Child be born."

Cities have not only a certain physiognomy; they have also a decided
mental and moral character, and a definite political tendency. There
are good and bad cities, artistic and commercial cities, scholarly and
manufacturing cities, aristocratic and radical cities. San Antonio, in
its political and social character, was a thoroughly radical city.
Its population, composed in a large measure of adventurous units from
various nationalities, had that fluid rather than fixed character, which
is susceptible to new ideas. For they were generally men who had found
the restraints of the centuries behind them to be intolerable--men to
whom freedom was the grand ideal of life.

It maybe easily undertood{sic} that this element in the population of
San Antonio was a powerful one, and that a little of such leaven would
stir into activity a people who, beneath the crust of their formal
piety, had still something left of that pride and adventurous spirit
which distinguished the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel.

In fact, no city on the American continent has such a bloody record as
San Antonio. From its settlement by the warlike monks of 1692, to its
final capture by the Americans in 1836, it was well named "the city of
the sword." The Comanche and the white man fought around its walls their
forty years' battle for supremacy. From 1810 to 1821 its streets were
constantly bloody with the fight between the royalists and republicans,
and the city and the citadel passed from, one party to the other
continually. And when it came to the question of freedom and American
domination, San Antonio was, as it had ever been, the great Texan
battle-field.

Its citizens then were well used to the fortunes and changes of war. Men
were living who had seen the horrors of the auto da fe and the
splendors of viceregal authority. Insurgent nobles, fighting priests,
revolutionizing Americans, all sorts and conditions of men, all chances
and changes of religious and military power, had ruled it with a
temporary absolutism during their generation.

In the main there was a favorable feeling regarding its occupation by
the Americans. The most lawless of them were law-abiding in comparison
with any kind of victorious Mexicans. Americans protected private
property, they honored women, they observed the sanctity of every man's
hom