APPEARANCE OF CAREER A. 



231 



but submission. The Assembly met in terror and dis- 

 traction, and the result was an assent to all that was 

 demanded. 



At five o'clock the small band of government troops 

 evacuated the plaza. The infantry, amounting to three 

 hundred, marched out by the Calle Real, or Royal- 

 street. The cavalry, seventy in number, exclusive of 

 officers, on their march through another street, met an 

 aiddecamp of Carrera, who ordered them to lay down 

 their arms. Yanez answered that he must first see his 

 general ; but the dragoons, suspecting some treachery 

 on the part of Valenzuela, became panic-struck, and 

 fled. Yaiiez, with thirty-five men, galloped through 

 the city, and escaped by the road to Mixco ; the rest 

 rushed back into the plaza, threw down their lances in 

 disgust, dismounted and disappeared, when not a single 

 man was left under arms. 



In the mean time Carrera' s hordes were advancing. 

 The commandant of the Antiguans asked him if he had 

 his masses divided into squares or companies ; he an- 

 swered, "No entiendo nada de eso. Todo es uno." 

 " I don't understand anything of that. It is all the 

 same." Among his leaders were Monreal and other 

 known outlaws, criminals, robbers, and murderers. 

 He himself was on horseback, with a green bush in his 

 hat, and hung round with pieces of dirty cotton cloth, 

 covered with pictures of the saints. A gentleman who 

 saw them from the roof of his house, and who was fa- 

 miliar with all the scenes of terror which had taken 

 place in that unhappy city, told me that he never felt 

 such consternation and horror as when he saw the entry 

 of this immense mass of barbarians ; choking up the 

 streets, all with green bushes in their hats, seeming at 

 a distance like a moving forest ; armed with rusty mus- 



