The Freebooters by Gustave Aimard — Read

More fortunate than dramatic authors, the romancers, being bound by no rules of time and place, can, at their pleasure, transport their action and characters from one country to another, and then return to their starting point, not having any account to give of the time that has elapsed, or of the space they have traversed. Employing in our turn this privilege, we will momentarily quit the Indian border, on the skirt of which our story has hitherto passed, and crossing at a leap over about two hundred miles, beg the reader to follow us to Galveston, in the centre of Texas, four months after the events we chronicled in our last chapter.

At the period when our story is laid, that city, in which General Lallemand wished to found the _Champ d'Asyle_ -- that sublime Utopia of a noble and broken heart -- was far from that commercial prosperity which the progress of civilization, successive immigrations, and, most of all, the speculations of bold capitalists, have caused it to attain during the last few years. We shall therefore describe it such as it was during our stay in America, leaving out of sight the enormous transformations it has since undergone.