you may thank me for letting you so much into native character. The chevalier, who wears so lofty an air, is a barber.” He saw my look of incredulity. “Was, I should say. He is now on the point of sustaining the diplomatic honours of the country at the Court of France. I ought to have told you, however, that he shaved nothing less than princes of the blood. His razor never crossed plebeian chins. For twenty years he performed this important office, and, to his credit be it spoken, performed it well. At the end of the twenty years, fortune smiled still more fondly. He was promoted to the office of tonsor to his most Catholic Majesty. In Spain, the man nearest the royal mouth is nearest the royal heart-he has the command of the only road of communication. From the King's mustaches the transition was easy into the King's secrets. Joaquim the barber was transformed into Don Joaquim the privy counsellor. The velvet of preferment was now laid under his feet. He trode it with the discretion of a royal barber, until the time for other qualities came. Revolution flourished the red cap over the brown; statesmen were required to give Spain the knowledge, that, with all her cigars and sunshine, she was the most unhappy nation under the moon. The don was conceived to have imbibed statesmanship from his office, and, as he was the most ready of renegades, the rabble pronounced him the most sublime of patriots. So runs the world away." "But the lady," said I-" of course not his wife. But that haughty air, since queens do not shave, must have been drawn from other sources than her cultivating the mustaches of her Majesty. She is evidently one of your court ornaments."

"Yes," said Altuna. "She is well enough acquainted with courts. I have seen her queening it herself on half the stages of Spain; and, from the Queen of Sheba at a Valencian fair, to Statira and Semiramis in the royal opera, she has carried the crown and sceptre those forty years."

"She seems to have thriven, like her friend Don Joaquim, by her court life," said I.

"Oh, vastly!" was the answer. "She began the world in a baggage

waggon at the tail of the Alcantara cavalry regiment. Her mother sold her to the purveyor of the corps for a flask of Xeres wine. The purveyor disposed of his bargain to a travelling gipsy, who, in the summer, by the help of a double length of beard, a ragged gown, and a plausible tongue, acted the pilgrim to the shrine of St Jaques of Toledo, St Peter's at Rome, or any spot that best pleased the public ear at the time. In the winter he laid aside his saintly costume-raised contributions on the saintly no moretook his share in the humours of this odd world-lived on the sinners, and delighted Spain with a monkey, a dancing dog, and a tabor. Under such auspices the young daughter of the cavalry acquired all varieties of knowledge, and, possessing remarkable beauty-now, it must be owned, a little in the wane-remarkable sagacity, which she never failed to turn to the best advantage, and a thorough acquaintance with the heights and depths of human society, which will make her memoirs the most amusing and the most dreaded things in the world, sits down a Millionaire."

"But what brings her here ?" was the natural question.

"She is a diplomate of the first magnitude," was the reply. "Half the places about court have been sold by her for the last twenty years. Even the don himself had to thank her good opinion for his honours. She is as avaricious as Mammon, and must be paid; but she transacts her affairs with remarkable promptitude, and I impute to her exquisite punctuality the loss of a diamond watch and the cleverest valet I ever had. I saw him to day, just a week after he had brushed my uniform, gazetted as a cornet in the royal hussars. I missed my repeater at the same moment, and I have not the slightest doubt that the one made its way into the pocket of La Teresina yonder, at the same time with my rascal's assuming the hussar. Wretched system!" he murmured, with a voice of struggling indignation. "Wretched nation-wretched King! Can you wonder, Señor Inglese,”—and he turned his eyes on me, almost blazing with bitter wrath as he spoke,

can any man with a spark of human feeling about him, wonder, that

me, that I was destined to close my career in this horrible hole. Nothing could be more ungenial to all my perceptions. My dreams of heroism had closed half-a-dozen years before, when, after the last rocket was sent up in honour of the peace, and Napoleon was fairly under weigh for the rocks of St Helena, I returned my sabre into the sheath, hung my shako up in my paternal balls, and took leave of the Dragoons, to sit down upon my paternal acres, and be a Cincinnatus for life. Of Parliament I had seen enough, to know that there is no spot of earth where a legislator may sooner get a headach, and to less purpose.

Diplomatic dinners, fancy balls, and fêtes champêtres, all had taken their turn, and all been pronounced vanity, if not vexation of spirit. But at this moment, they revived upon me with a remarkable pungency of recollection. I would have sat out the dullest debate ever engendered by the corn laws, or the claims of that new fourth estate of England which pauperism and public orators have nearly erected into the first, to have found my foot on the pavements of Madrid, or to have been sounding my perilous passage homeward through the narrowest defile of its rugged and gloomy lanes. At length even those thoughts passed away. All that was slight and trivial in my contemplations was changed into the successive shades of strong irritation, alarm, fierce anger, and absolute despair. For a long time I had balanced between the probabilities, that Altuna had been tempted by the wine, the time, and his own passion for frolic, to play a rough jest on me; or that, by some unaccountable mistake, a place obviously intended for a criminal, had been turned into the prison of an English gentleman, unconnected with either the party of the populace, or the party of the monks. I had not omitted, in the meantime, the common expedients to avoid dying unknown. I had shouted with the full strength of my lungs; I had beaten the walls of my dungeon with the fragment of the little bench which constituted its sole furniture. I had howled and harangued, and struggled, and torn, while hope remained; and not till hope and strength died together, had

I intermitted my labours. At length, after the third or fourth routine of this exercise, which seemed as unproductive as the first, I flung my self on the ground, and tried to imagine with what complacency I could resign myself to the prospect of dying like a poisoned rat in a burrow. This lasted for a few minutes; but my magnanimity then gave way, and I felt practically, how much easier it is to talk of martyrdom than to undergo its preliminaries. Perhaps I might have had the hardihood to mount the scaffold, the proper occasion being shewn; but my experience fully told me, that solitary confinement was not made for my calibre, and I determined, that if I were ever to get to the sight of the open sky again, the age of persecution should not find me among its candidates.

man

At this moment a slight gleam of radiance, fine as a hair, passed along the side of the cell. With the quickness of an eye now sharpened to the discovery of every object round me, I saw a fissure in the wall, which seemed a door that had been lately built up. I instantly sprung on my feet, and clung to the spot. Fancy is an eager thing; but no knows its zeal until he has tried it, in the hope of an escape from being buried alive. This door, I was perfectly convinced, must lead to the open air. Nothing but a few loose stones, therefore, made the difference between my leaving my mortal remains within the jaws of a Spanish dungeon, and my carrying them back to the calm halls and broad demesnes of my forefathers. I worked with furious energy for the first half hour I seemed to work at a wall of adamant. But what will not labour do, when the labourer is thoroughly in earnest ? I began to make progress. Never had I experienced a more rapturous sensation, than when the first fragment of stone dropped out of this intolerable wall at my feet. I uttered a frantic exclamation of joy. I felt like one rescued from a sinking ship, or hearing a verdict of acquittal in a case of life and death, or in any one of the agonizing delights formed of the mere intensity of emotion. The wall now began to give way in larger masses. At length, with an

effort which exhausted my whole remaining strength, I rushed against it, and drove it in. I had overbalanced myself in the effort, and followed the wall. It carried me through the breach triumphantly to the other side. But never were hopes so suddenly extinguished. The space into which I was thrown was to the full as dark as the former one. It was even worse, for it evidently lay deeper in the earth by a number of steps, down which I had rolled, and by the sickly smell of air, which no ventilation of the gales above had ever shaken. Yet this was not all that was to appal me in this horrible place. As I crept round the dungeon-for I was now scarcely able to stand-I stumbled against something which sprung together with a loud rattling of chains and springs. I recoiled for the moment; but on my approaching it more cautiously, I was convinced, from its resemblance to the machinery of torture, which had been brought from the cells of the "Grand Inquisition," that this instrument was of the same class, and that I was in one of the caverns of the Brotherhood. My blood ran cold. Was I now in the very spot where this most hideous tyranny exerted its most hideous cruelty? In this den, hidden from the light of heaven, and where no cry could reach the human ear, had unhappy beings breathed out existence in the wildest torments of human nature! The thought, conspiring with the strange excitement of the earlier part of the night, the anxieties which had followed, and the fierce fever of terror and indignation which was now firing every artery of my frame, probably shook the soberness of my understanding for the time; and as I fixed my eyes, even in the utter darkness, on the machine, I began to think that the whole process of agony was before me. What can set limits to the force and keenness, the bitter, realizing power of the imagination, when once set in movement? Let those who have ever felt the nightmare, deny, if they can, the singular faculty of wretchedness, the power of accumulating woe on woe, the fearful and intense misery which the mind can embody for itself out of airy shapes, and the perturbations of an unsound

slumber. I was now under an influence scarcely less abstracted from the common things of life, and scarcely less surcharged with the impulses of desertion, terror, and despair. A glance that reverted to the world, only served to increase the depth and power of my present sensations. An hour before, I had been free as air, enjoying life, with every appurtenance and prospect of long enjoyment, in the midst of brilliancy and beauty, dancing and feasting, amusing myself with looking over one of the curious pictures of animated life, and listening with the ear of a critic to characters, whose bearers I was scrutinizing with the eye of a connoisseur. Where was the picture now? A door, a few steps to the right or left, and either treachery or accident had separated me for ever from the whole scene of human life. But this morning I was opulent, free, fortunate, an object of envy to the multitude, who gazed at my horses, my domestics, and the other common appendages to a man of condition. Now the meanest beggar that crept through the streets above my head would not exchange with me. The contrast worked so strongly on my mind, that more than once I conceived that I was actually in a dream, and put forth my hands to examine myself that I was awake. But there the conviction came with unanswerable clearness. I felt the straps, the wheels, the chains, the horrid screws that twisted not iron but flesh; the springs that tore asunder, not brute matter, but living muscle; the devilish enginery, every turn of which was answered by human groans; the whole hideous combination of implements to torture the mind. The vision grew upon me. In darkness as intense as if light had never been created, I seemed to see the victim stretched on that bed of torment. The features gradually dawned upon me. I saw the sunken eye fixed' on heaven-the writhing brow covered with drops, such as are wrung from the heart and brain by intolerable suffering-the lips pale as death, and writhing, yet trying to send forth a prayer for a speedy escape into the grave. The countenance was lofty and intellectual; the cheek was hollow as with long study, but the eye shot the fires of

genius. I saw the lips move, thin and dry with pain, but they were filled with the words of eloquence and feeling. He was a parent: he implored the protection of Heaven for his wife and children. I saw the tears burst out in a sudden stream as he uttered the words. He was a patriot: he prayed that the time might come, when true wisdom would teach true humanity, and the reign of force would give way to the reign of justice. As he spoke, I saw a single flush of generous and bold indignation redden his whole countenance. He had one prayer more. He was a Christian, In accents deep and solemn, but which were fast sinking into the whispers of death, I heard him supplicate the common father of all to visit his country with a sacred knowledge which was not to be retarded by the rack and the scaffold, take the veil from the blinded eyes of power, and give the light of faith and holiness, pure, free, and universal, to all the sons of men. As he pronounced the words, I heard a sudden sound of many feet; a crowd of muffled figures seemed to grow out of the darkness, and rush round the engine. I saw the victim clasped down to it with double chains; I heard the infernal springs and wheels creaking to give him another round of torture. I saw him, to the last, resigned; his large eye still fixed above, his lips moving with unutterable prayer, his withered hands clasped together; his whole frame, his countenance, his thought, all in one high aspiration for heaven. The executioners now applied themselves to their task; I saw the huge windlass of the rack whirl round; I heard a crush, a groan that might have pierced to the centre of the earth. I found myself seized at the same moment by those invisible agents of misery. The reverie was gone; here at least all was reality. I was flung forward on the bed of iron, and felt as if life was passing away from me. Still I made one violent effort for liberty. I grasped the mantle of an assailant, who already had his grasp round my throat. The mantle was torn from his shoulders in the struggle. A small lamp, hung from his breast, shewed me a form strangely covered with shining emblems and

mystic figures. The sight would have startled me at another period, for, as he turned away, the whole frame of the man seemed to glow into a strange unnatural light, and the mystic figures to quiver with melancholy lustre. But this was no time even for fear. The intensity of terror had, by one of the anomalies of the human mind, given me a morbid courage. I should have plunged into a herd of lions at that hour; I should have rushed into a midnight sea; I should have battled with an army. The agony of the thought of dying alone, and in famine, in frenzy exclaiming against fate and fortune, where none could hear, perishing by inches, leaving my name to the thousand strange, contemptuous, and insulting explanations which the world, that, in its soul, loves a sneer, would be sure to invent for my unaccountable disappearance; the extinction of my being in the moment when life was scarcely more than opening on me; above all, one, one great engrossing thought, the hope which had been so rapidly born, and so rapidly extinguished, yet which still a cloudy combination of ideas had, from time to time, even on this night, so painfully and so powerfully revived the memory of Catalina, the tone which still vibra, ted in my ears, an undefined impression that she might have been saved from the ruin of her household, and that my sun, which had been so long obscured, would set in clearness and serenity, gave life an interest in my eyes of pungency indescribable.

I struggled, but numbers prevailed. A cloak was thrown over my face, a scarf was strongly bound round my arms; and in this state I was raised from the ground, to which I had fallen during the contest, and carried with difficulty to some distance. My first conception had been that I was to be torn by the rack in the chamber, and I tried to raise my remonstrance against this atrocity. But the cloak was only the more tightly pressed upon my face, and I was half suffocated into a sense of the uselessness of appealing to either the fears or the feelings of my murderers. Yet I was obviously leaving this dreaded chamber. Sometimes dragged, sometimes carried, some