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Updated: May 31, 2025
Mother, I have as much courage as our steel-clad fathers ever had. I have dared in battle and in deserts, against man and the wild beast, against the storm and the ocean, against the rude powers of Nature, dangers as dread as ever pilgrim or Crusader rejoiced to brave. But courage against that one memory! no, I have none!"
To have seen that great steel-clad figure moving with sudden life would have struck terror to even the stoutest hearts, and shaken the steadiest nerves. But these superstitious Mexicans were driven almost out of their excitable minds by the sudden horror of this seeming apparition. Of one accord they fled, gibbering, towards the stairs, one falling in a faint from fright before he reached them.
Ovando set out at the head of nearly four hundred well armed soldiers, seventy of whom were steel-clad horsemen; giving out that he was coming on a visit of friendship, to make arrangements for the payment of tribute. Behechio, the ancient cazique of the province, was dead, and his sister, Anacaona, wife of the late formidable chief Caonabo, had succeeded to the government.
The mansions of the Desmonds, of the Burgos, of the Ormonds, were the headquarters of their respective clans, not the inaccessible fortresses of steel-clad warriors, who alone were possessed of social and civil rights. If the master of the household held sometimes the title of earl, or count, or baron, he was careful never to use it before his retainers, whom he called his clansmen.
There was little of leading value in the arts and industries of the West which had not been introduced into this island empire, the equipment of her army vied with that of the most advanced powers, her navy possessed a number of the most powerful type of steel-clad battle-ships, she had been admitted into the family of the great nations by a compact on equal terms with Great Britain, and she had become adapted to cope with powers vastly more capable in the arts of war than China, to deal, indeed, with one of the greatest and much the most populous of European nations.
Soon the Iroquois filed out from their barricade and advanced, some two hundred in number, many of them carrying shields of wood covered with hide, others protected by a rude armor of tough twigs interlaced. As they confidently marched forward, imagine their amazement when the ranks of the enemy suddenly opened, and their steel-clad champion stepped to the front!
Thus harnessed for the field, he was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the country folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was the steel-clad hero of La Mancha among the goatherds of the Sierra Morena.
No steel-clad baron of Norman days, no ruthless red-stockinged cardinal, with the Bastile in one hand and the tumbril in the other, ever ruled with so total an absence of Heart as the modern "official," the Tyrants of the nineteenth century; whose rods are hobbies in the name of science miscalled, in the name of temperance perverted, in the name of progress backwards, in the name of education without food.
All along the pathway of human progress, the courts of justice have been the sure criteria by which to judge of the intelligence and virtue of our race. Truly it has been said: "With the coming of the lawyer came a new power in the world. The steel-clad baron and his retainers were awed by terms they had never before heard and did not understand, such as precedent, principle, and the like.
I knew it was folly and a madman's dream, for I felt most deeply my common clay. What had I to offer for the heart of that proud lady? A dingy and battered merchant might as well enter a court of steel-clad heroes and contend for the love of a queen. But I was not downcast. I do not think I even wanted to hope.
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