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320, but they as often replied that they would continue the defence so long as one of them remained alive. Four days passed, during which crowds of wretched men, women, and children, emaciated and dying of hunger, came to the Spaniards and gave themselves up. The warriors were still unsubdued; by night and by day they made their assaults, but they were so exhausted by hunger that they accomplished little harm. At last Cortez gave the signal for a general assault, by the firing of a musket, and the eager troops and ferocious Indian allies fell upon the unarmed and half-starved wretches so fiercely that in one day twelve thousand, and in another forty thousand, perished. The common people were ready to surrender, though thousands of them were butchered as they fell into the hands of their enemies; but the priests and nobles, headed by their indomitable king, refused to submit. They prayed for death; "If you are the child of the sun," said they to Cortez, "why are you so slow in delivering us from our calamities by death?"

Cortez sent to Guatemotzin an embassy with a present of provisions, and asking for a conference, but though returning assuring answers, that wily monarch was unwilling to trust his person within reach of one who had always hated him, and who had caused the murder of his uncle, Montezuma, though professedly his friend. Cortez promised him plenitude of power and honors if he would but surrender and thus terminate the bloody siege; but Guatemotzin only retreated farther into the fortified portion of his diminished capital, and stubbornly refused to listen to his words. Artillery was then brought up and trained upon the defenceless people crowded in the streets and beneath the porticoes of the buildings, and the allies again glutted their rage upon helpless men and women, who threw themselves into the canals, which became purple with the blood of the slain. In misery and woe they were perishing by thousands, when