The Caledonian

A LESSON.
Cowardice and cruelty are always close allies. And of this general truth, some recent incidents, afford a pertinent and striking proof. While our army was encamped at Agua Nueva, before the battle of Buena Vista, a young man named Colquit, from Arkansas, was murdered by the Mexicans, and his body treated with inhumanity characteristic of the robber bands which infest the country. The Arkansas volunteers, to the number of thirty or over, resolved upon vengeance, and went out to the foot of the mountain to which the peasantry of Agua Nueva had fled, and commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of the poor creatures who had fled thither for safety! Of this most inhuman deed, a correspondent of the St. Louis Republican says:

"No act of inhuman cruelty, perpetrated by desperate robbers, can excel the work of yesterday, committed by our soldiery. God knows how many of the unarmed peasantry have been sacrificed to atone the blood of poor Colquit. The Arkansas regiment say not less than thirty have been killed. I think, however, that at least twenty of them have been sent to their eternal rest. I rode through the chapparals, and round a number of their dead bodies, not yet cold. The features, in every instance, were composed and tranquil—lying upon their backs, eyes closed, and feet crossed." You would have supposed them sleeping, but for the gory stream which bedewed the turf around them. In some instances, after the vital spark had fled in the overflow of demoniac vengeance, the carbine ball dashed out the brains of its clayey victim."

These men of the Arkansas regiment, so blood thirsty when unarmed men, women and children were to be butchered in cold blood, so brave when there was no danger, so callous and dead to all the instincts of humanity—were the first to fly ignobly from the face of danger—to desert their fellow soldiers when pressed by overwhelming numbers, and to leave them to what they deemed certain death! It was the Arkansas troops which fled to Saltillo, and reported, falsely and basely, that Gen. Taylor was in full retreat!—New York Courier.