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306 Tezcatlipoca on top of the great temple. The sound was most melancholy. An instrument of the devil it was indeed, for every time its doleful tones startled our ears, they were offering the hearts and blood of our comrades before their idols. Beset from housetop, canoes and causeway, we had not near accomplished our retreat when Guatemoc ordered the great horn to be sounded—the signal of the monarch that he permitted his troops no choice but victory or death. Echoings and re-echoings of this horn roused the warriors to terrific fury, and they threw themselves forward till they fairly ran upon our swords. If the Almighty had not lent us strength, we must have perished; without God's aid we should never have reached our quarters. Miserable we were, every one of us wounded, and the distress we were in was more terrible from our uncertainty as to what had happened to Cortes' and Sandoval's divisions. The cry of the Mexicans when they threw before us the five heads tied together by the hair and beards still rang in our ears.

Let us now turn to Sandoval, who was marching victoriously along the causeway his men had captured, when the Mexicans, stimulated by the defeat of Cortes, turned on him and his forces. And they turned so effectively that he had to begin a retreat. At this moment the enemy also cast among his men the bleeding heads of six of our fellow-soldiers from