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times rolled down a long succession of steps, I was still going forward, though why, or whither, was the problem. The covering of my face left my fancy to do her will, and I had my choice of every startling mode of quitting the world that ever signalized the history of dungeons. At length I felt my bearers suddenly stop. A door creaked on its hinges; I was carried forward a few steps, and then seated. The cloak was now taken from my eyes. The sight that met them was sufficiently solemn.

In the centre of the room was a low scaffold-on it a guillotine. Two men, habited in long dark cloaks, stood at the foot of the scaffold with drawn sabres. An executioner was in the act of pulling up the axe of the instrument of death; and while I sat, still bound, and in no slight anxiety to know whether the whole preparation were not for myself, I was not deficient in the full inclination to plead my privileges as a Briton; but with my hands bound, and the heavy mantle still tight round my mouth, all appeal to feelings on the present occasion was hopeless. I sat a mute spectator, though by no means a tranquil one. In a few minutes a movement was heard beyond a huge curtain, which hung from the roof over a portion of this sepulchral chamber. The only light was from a torch, which burned, fixed in the scaffold, at the foot of the headsman. All was grim and ghastly,-all the parties wore masks,-and even this disguise added to the gravity of the scene, as if the act about to be perpetrated was one which rendered the actors naturally objects of horror or vengeance to their fellowmen. But the curtain was suddenly flung aside for a small space. A short shrill blast of a trumpet, and a clash of arms, followed; and, advancing from a narrow and dim passage, came a line of figures covered, like the attendants of the guillotine, in black cloaks, masked, and bearing pikes and sabres. As they reached the foot of the scaffold they divided, and I saw, with increasing astonishment, a human form suddenly lifted upon the scaffold, as suddenly seized by the attendants, and flung under the axe of the guillotine. However this might have decided my doubts

as to my being the intended subject of the revolutionary steel, I actually felt myself so much shocked at seeing this rapid termination to the existence of a human being brought thus to my eyes, that, for the instant, I forgot that at least a substitute had been provided for me. I actually cried out with involuntary emotion, and with a force which penetrated the folds of the mantle, and made the performers in this frightful tragedy pause in their occupation. A figure, which I had not before perceived, now seemed to rise from the ground, and stalking to the front of the scaffold, while the wretched victim of this cruelty still lay waiting the blow which was to separate him from the world, he pronounced the words,-"Let all whom the love of their country inspires, learn to reverence the majesty of truth. On this scaffold lies a traitor; he overheard the secret councils of patriotism, and revealed them to the Despot. Therefore, the vengeance of the free condemned him; the power of the mighty grasped him. Thus shall the betrayer of the mysteries of freedom perish from the earth; and thus shall the lover of tyranny feel that justice repays the chains of the Despot by the axe of the law." At these words, pronounced in a solemn and sonorous voice, the trumpet sounded, the sabres clashed again, and the blade of the guillotine fell; a single slight groan was heard, and the head sprang off on the floor of the scaf fold.

Struck with horror and surprise at this consummation, I plunged my face in the mantle, that I might shut out, if possible, the sight and its memory together. When I raised my eyes once more, the engine of death, the corpse, and the executioner, had disappeared. But the armed figures remained; and in front of them stood the Orator, ready to commence a harangue on the virtues of republicanism. That it could be worth the while of this regenerator of nations to waste his eloquence on the conversion of a simple individual like myself, would never have entered into my thoughts, had not the address at length applied all its allusions directly to my circumstances, as the native of a land of peculiar freedom, the natural protector

of human rights in every corner of the globe, and the natural hater of tyranny of all shapes and colours. Something of this was romance, and something was absurdity; but I never listened to public oratory with less inclination to think fretfully of the Cicero who was employing his skill to convert me. I felt the entire difference between persuasion and punishment, and infinitely preferred the sonorous tone of the harangue to the sharp short click of the steel. At the close, the Orator stamped strongly on the ground, and before me, as if by magic, rose a small altar, surmounted with an open volume. He lighted a torch at a tripod burning with a strong perfume, and holding it above my head, as if to let in light through the crevices of my brains, summoned me to enrol my name among the heroes of regeneration. As he spoke, the surrounding group waved their sabres in the air, and then pointed them at my breast, a significant gesture, which very distinctly told me the alternative of refusing to be persuaded. The mantle was now withdrawn from my lips,-my hands were free. I glanced for a moment over the declaration, which was merely a general pledge to live and die for liberty. This seemed to me sufficiently innocent and commonplace, and I was about to put my sig. nature to the volume, when I heard the report of a pistol which seemed to come from the ceiling, directly above my head. The omen was not a fortunate one. I paused-it appeared to be as little admired by my attendant patriots, for it produced an instant hesitation among them. While my hand was yet resting on the volume, I heard the voice of Altuna without; the curtain was thrown open, and he rushed in, followed by some files of soldiers. A brief skirmish began with the sabrebearers, which soon ended in the flight of some, and the capture of the rest. In the tumult, the volume had fallen to the ground. Altuna darted to where it lay, cast a rapid look over the signatures, and then first appeared to have discovered

me.

He might well, indeed, have doubted my identity, torn and worn as I was by the night's work; but he made up for any tardiness of re

cognition, by the boundless ardour of his reminiscences, when they had returned. He embraced me with more than Spanish assiduity-made a hundred enquiries as to my wounds, escapes, and wrongs of all kinds imprecated vengeance in every shape on the contrivers of the artifice, by which his most excellent friend had been brought into such a state of peril, and could not sufficiently express his rejoicing that my name was not to be found in the volume, which he now informed me was nothing less than a list of conspirators against the royal life, under the pretence of zeal for the constitution. "The King is exasperated against those traitors," said Altuna, adding, with almost a shudder, that, if by any accident, the name of his excellent friend had been found among them, let the artifice which brought it there be what it might, royal vengeance might have fallen too quick to be anticipated. The capitan was not much in the habit of appealing to the saints, but on this occasion his piety came upon him in a flood, and he shewed himself master of a bead roll of sanctity which unfolded a new chapter in the accomplishments of my gallant protector. I was prodigiously edified, and grateful in proportion; his rapture at my recovery, for a minute more might have made me figure on the block, or stand the fire of a platoon of the royal guard on the Plaza, without much enquiry as to my national privileges, cancelled a whole host of eccentricities, and we were firmer friends than ever.

The affair of the night was naturally enough explained, in the trials of the conspirators, which took place in a few days-an extraordinary despatch of Spanish justice. They had held their meetings in the vaults adjoining the building where La Crescembini gave her weekly reunions of all that was fair and fantastic in Madrid-a palace of the graces where all the leaders of the new régime met weekly, for the purpose of carrying on the business of the nation in the old national way, under the garb of festivity. There patriot met patriot in a waltz, and laws emanated from a quadrille; there expeditions were planned under cover of a game of loto, and embassies were dispo

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rabble want a holiday exhibition, or a new minister of justice wants an opportunity to shew his vigour for the first time and the last; or the priests denounce a failure in the Virgin's milk, or the annual tears of St Ursula, for the iniquity of the land, and the order arrives for a general clearance of the dungeons. Then patriarchs with hoary heads and shaking limbs, are astonished to find themselves called on to be strangled for assassinations or poisonings of fifty years before. Families of prison-birds are suddenly left without their venerable guide in the arts of living on the public. Wives are torn from the sides of the ancient pilferers with whom they had lived in the clank of the chain for the term of an honest man's natural life; and the gibbet is surrounded with octogenarian thievery, not at all distinguishable from the pilgrims to our Lady of Montserrat, or the summits of the Alpuxarras; and rivalling in majesty of beard and honesty of principle, the most eminent of the Franciscans and Dominicans, who escort them to the confines of purgatory.

sed of to the silvery tones of a harp, blending with the still more silvery tones of some siren of the opera, or some exquisite compound of beauty and the beaux arts, from the coteries of sea-washed Cadiz, of all cities the most festive. But sterner deeds were done below. In all revolutions there is an under current of a darker hue, which struggles against the upper. The shewy patriot is only the stratum of the surface the dust, the clay, the pebble; the solid metal of Republicanism lies at a greater depth, yet ready to display itself on the first opportunity of real mischief. Ora tors figure and flourish on the outside. But it is in the depths of the mine that the explosion awaits its hour; then woe to the orators, and to the fools who trusted them; the fire-damp once touched by the spark, away go the haranguers into the elements, the conspirators against life are masters of the conspirators against principles, the dagger silences the quibble, the scaffold becomes the national logician, the reign of metaphor passes away, the reign of reason and treason has arrived. Strong sense and sound blows carry all before them; and the ruffian, trampling the hypocrite, is master of the land. On the present occasion the rebel had rather urged himself too rapidly into notice; and as all was constitution, toleration, conciliation, and the other softnesses of public overthrow for the time, it was thought proper by the friends of freedom to stop this too hot whirl of the wheel, until the fitting season had come. Spain hailed the discovery, and the trial, with the eager ness of all the mobs of earth for novelty, whether of Government, puppet-shews, or hanging. But the public curiosity was to be disappointed in the latter instance. In Spain, no man is hanged until his crime is forgotten. The custom is immemorial, and as such customs are not to be broken through for temporary convenience, the Spanish dungeons are filled with culprits who have commenced trades since their incarceration, have married, become the fathers of families, and carried on every course of life but their old one, with every prospect of seeing their great-grandchildren. But the prisons grow too full, or the

My last adventure had surfeited me of Spain. What had I to do with the fates of men, who cared more for the arrival of a packet of Havannah cigars, than for the wealth, learning, or liberty, of half mankind? I felt a strong distaste for the grave frivolity and empty pretension of foreign life. I longed to return to the only country where enjoyment may be reconciled with manly pursuits, and where the human race does not drop, generation after generation, into the tomb, as useless as leaves from the tree. Yet whenever I conceived the determination as complete, I felt a lingering reluctance to quit the soil which held, living or dead, a being who had fastened a most resistless fetter on my mind. To drag the chain, and find it clinging to me until the last hour of my being, seemed to be so decisively my fate, that I was the less solicitous where I dragged it. My days had been suddenly and strangely clouded. No man, by habit and by nature, more disdained romance. No man was less inclined to exhibit himself as a mendicant on the world's sympathies, by the displays of a broken spirit. But there is no use in

attempting to account for feelings which must be experienced before they can be understood; and which, once experienced, are known to be among the most absorbing and overwhelming of the human mind.

Thus unsettled, making daily resolutions to fly from the sounds and sights of the capital, and suffering them to lapse away, I was sinking into a feverish disgust of the world, when Altuna, of whom I had not seen much since our late adventure, entered the room. He looked hag gard and weary, he flung himself into a chair, and called for wine. "I am sick," said he, " of Spain-sick of every thing that Madrid holds-sick of the sun and sky. Señor, if you are going to leave this detestable place, I am at your service, for any thing, even to the Antipodes."

Singular as his speech was, his ap pearance amply seconded all that he said of his exhaustion. The gay cavalier was completely lost in the hollow eyed and sallow-cheeked son of dissipation before me. I offered him the use of my purse. "I owe you money enough already," said he." My busi ness is now to leave Spain as quickly as I can; but whether as a volunteer to the Americas, or a convict to the slave coast, or as a mendicant round the world, is in the clouds yet. I come to ask the opinionof the Señor Inglese." "The Señor Inglese, then, has but one opinion," was my answer. "We are both the worse for staying too long in this stifling city; we shall both be the better for leaving it."

His pallid cheek was lighted up with a gleam of satisfaction. "I leave it to you, Altuna, who know the carte du pays better than any of the idlers round us, to fix in what directionweshall take our departure." "Then, as far from Spain as we can," was the prompt answer. "I have now no ties here. This morning I resigned my commission in the Guards. They are to be newmodelled. I am weary of revolutions. They never can be more than a pantomime in Spain. Clowns and barlequins are their natural actorsgentlemen and soldiers are too serious performers for these carica tures of statesmanship. I leave them to buffoons."

I proposed Italy. The project was instantly adopted. Twelve

hours more saw us pass through the Puerto del Sol. Carthagena was the port which I fixed on for our embarkation. It was a detour; but I had recollections, which made the wildest valley of Murcia dearer to me than the perfumed plains of Granada, or the picturesque hills of Catalonia. Through Murcia we accordingly drove, as fast as six mules could sweep us along. I stipulated but for one delay in our route; that we should leave the high-road when it approached the site of what had once been the seat of the unhappy Ildefonzo family. Altuna's countenance awoke from its dejection, as I spoke. He complied with habitual courtesy, and professed that, anxious as he was to leave Spain, and distressing as the scene must be to the feelings of all who had known how much merit and loveliness were buried there, he was ready to give way to any wish of mine on the subject.

When we approached the valley in which the palazzo had stood, all the remembrances of the hours and scenes that passed there, rose on my mind's eye with a vividness which almost unmanned me. As I saw the grove of elms which led to the gates of the stately mansion-the sun tinging the few remaining battlements

even the hill which sheltered it from the northern blast, and which had now exchanged its countless beds of flowers for a neglected and weedy covering, brown as the surface of the desert, I half regretted the love of painful emotion, the weakness which had brought me into such wilful suffering once more. But my companion's fortitude fully made up for any deficiency in mine. He resumed his energy in every sense of the word; led me through the ruins with the activity of an esta blished guide; pointed out in the dilapidated chambers the fragments which identified them as the favoured apartments of their once noble and lovely tenants. The musicrooms, the galleries of pictures and statues; the banqueting hall, with its magnificent marbles still wearing the smoke stains of that dreadful night; the mutilated statue of the founder of the family, which bad stood like the guardian genius of the palace at the great stair of entrance;

the boudoirs, still displaying the elegance of the taste that once delighted in their decoration-all had the remark of the buoyant chevalier, and all impressed me with an additional and indescribable pain. But there was one spot which was like a shrine to my anxious spirit-the spot where I had left Catalina in that night of terror, when, distracted by the fear of losing her, and unknowing how to protect her but by repelling the banditti who were at that moment firing on the palace, I rushed into the centre of the conflagration. All appeared as I had left it six months before. There lay the fragments of the sofa on which the head of the wounded Count had been reposed so fruitlessly. There remained, still discoverable, even the traces of that sanguine stream, which seemed to have flown conjunctly from his heart and that of the mistress of my own. I turned, abhorrent, from the sight, with a depression of mind which approached nearer to the feeling of death than any that I had ever known. In that eagerness of belief which will not be denied or discomfited, I asked Altuna whether any tidings had been heard of the head of the family, or of any of its members? He started to his feet at the question, and, with a livid smile, asked me abruptly whether he could be expected to solve a question which neither my money nor my zeal had been able to develope? I admitted the improbability, and the discourse turned away upon the furies of faction, the madness of the populace in all countries when the revolutionary firebrand is thrown among them, and the tenfold guilt of those in the higher ranks by whom that torch is thrown. My remark was slight and general; but it still evidently touched a string which accorded ill with his feelings. On raising my eyes, to account for the cause of his silence, I found him in violent agitation; the drops of perspiration rolling down his visage, his colour hectic, his lip quivering, and the glance with which his eye met mine, a sullen and fierce compound of contempt and dejection. I saw that he was not to be further spoken to, and allowing for the natural irritations which every man cherishes within his own bosom, and

which none are entitled to rouse, I walked away through the grounds. They were still beautiful. The depth of the valley had secured their rich vegetation from the heat which turns all the open country into the ashes of a furnace. In one of the most sheltered spots, under an arch of clematis and myrtle, still remained a fallen statue; the pedestal remained half-covered with the overgrown shrubs of the arbour. I withdrew a veil of verdure from the forehead of the overthrown image, and saw in the drapery, with the bow and quiver of a wood-nymph, a form that I would have compassed the world to see again. The sculptor had evidently taken Catalina for his model. The countenance was Catalina's; the same vividness of expression, the same beauty of feature, made captivating by the same exquisite sweetness of smile, and archness of meaning, were all before me. But where was the lovely creature, who, in the day of her living loveliness, had taught the hand and eye of art to perpetuate such grace and enchantment in his marble? A thousand thoughts, bitter and sweet, flowed into my mind with this recollection. The strange delight of giving full vent to sorrow, is known to all who have ever known what sorrow is. My eyes closed on all external things. The world seemed shut out, and with my forehead resting on my hand, I gave way to the wanderings into past dreams and future scenes, into thoughts of what might have been and what must be, that with the fevered spirit are almost substitutes for joy.

A slight rustling of the shrubs suddenly aroused me. Could I believe my eyes? The statue was on its pedestal. The wood-nymph, which I had seen flung on the ground, and heaped with the tendrils of the wild vine and weeds, was standing pure, bright, and perfect before me, as if it had but that moment parted from the artist's hand. I felt singularly perplexed by the completeness of what I yet could not doubt to be an illusion of my overwrought senses. At another time I should naturally have walked towards the figure, and ascertained the cause of this extraordinary change. But this must have been the act of

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