dependent of Mexico, and modelled after your own. To you we offer the hand of friendship, and whether accepted or not feel ourselves under a weight of obligation for your ready sympathy and individual assistance already rendered to us. And our course, although obscured by the clouds of misfortune at the present moment, never was more prosperous, and we feel that we must and shall succeed.[115]

Following the speech, dancing commenced in which the General and his staff joined in great good humor. Although the Anglo-American reels and cotillions were new to them, the native grace of their country carried them through with much éclat. After the company departed, a guitar was handed to Canales, who took it and accompanied his companions in singing some of their beautiful songs.

The romance of the scene, [wrote a witness from Bastrop] you can readily imagine, and I could not help contrasting it with the dire conflict from which they had so recently escaped. For the moment they were again at home, carroling their national airs with all the buoyancy of a gay spirit, forgetting that they were exiles from home and among a people so recently their enemy. Canales and his compatriots are all educated men, very intelligent, and gentlemanly in manners, and must make a favorable impression wherever they go.[116]

At Galveston the Federalists received considerable aid, "purchasing whatever they could obtain upon credit, whether it was useful to their purpose or not." Their purchases were not confined "to munitions of war and military supplies, but [they] bought women's dresses, parasols and every other thing they could get." A steamboat, the Constitution, was procured to take the goods and supplies to San Patricio, on the Nueces. John P. Kelsey, a native of New York, had arrived in Galveston in December 1839, and had set himself up as a merchant and speculator. In company with Paul Bremond, a successful general merchant of Houston, he took a stock of arms, munitions, and other supplies to Corpus Christi for sale and delivery to Canales; and when Canales marched to the Río Grande, Kelsey and Bremond accompanied the expedition. Some of the Texan traders and their Federalist cohorts saw in the revolutionary disturbances in the north, declared the historian John Henry Brown, "a clever subtifuge to cross into Mexico a