SAM HOUSTON 331 Congress, and reinterred at the public expense in the cemetery at Newport. The country also provided for the support of his family. If ever America produced 3 man whom the nation delighted to honor it was Perry. SAM HOUSTON* By Amelia E. Barr (l 793-1863) T' 'HE builders of the American Common- wealth were all great and individual men, but the most grandly picturesque, the most heroic, figure among them, is that of General Sam Houston. Neither modern history, nor the scrolls of ancient Greece or Rome, can furnish a tale of glory more thrilling and stirring than the epic Sam Houston wrote with sword and pen, as a Conqueror of Tyranny and a Liberator of Men. His life is a romance, and even his ante- cedents have the grandeur and glamour of military glory, for his ancestors, as " Sons of Old Gaul," had drawn their long swords in every battle for Scottish liberty, and his own father died while on military duty in the Alleghanies. He had also a mother worthy of the son she bore ; a grand, brave woman, who put the musket into his boyish hands with the words, " My doors are ever open to the brave, Sam, but are eternally closed to cowards." This was in the year 18 13, when there was promise of a war with England, and Sam was not then twenty years old a tall, slender, wonderfully handsome youth, with the air and manner of a prince. But nothing of this bearing was due to schools. or schoolmasters, he was not of any man's moulding^ although he had been educated for his future in a noble manner. For to escape the drudg- ery of measuring tape and molasses, he fled to the Indians when but a lad, and was adopted by their chief, and with the young braves he learned to run and leap, and hunt and ride, and find his way through pathless woods with all their skill. This was his practical education ; he had only one book for mental enlargement, but this was Pope's translation of " The Iliad." He read and re-read this volume till he could recite it from beginning to end ; till the words were living, and the spectral heroes were his friends and companions. So that when he joined Gen- Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.
