of half-a-dozen dead ages, and living All this was curious, stirring, and new. It was something to see a Spaniard in motion. It was more to see the whole country determining to do something, though prodigiously puzzled to think what that something should be. One and all were resolved to make a figure in the history of the nineteenth century, and, above all, not to be laughed at by the babaus of Paris. An Englishman looks with a sort of natural pity on all nations who have not a habeas corpus act, a pension list, and a jail in every county town strong enough to stand a siege. Spain has not one of the three; and my sympathies were strongly enlisted for the sufferings of a gallant people, who knew no more of a national debt, than of a tunnel to the antipodes. I landed in Murcia, a province abounding in the misfortune of being the favourite position with the Spanish tale-tellers of every atrocity of which knife or bane is the natural parent. If you were to meet a hundred chroniclers, ninety-nine of them would begin their history of highway robbery or domestic extinction by" One evening, as a cavalier and his lady were galloping by the Bustamente pass in Murcia; some or, "as a noble lady of Murcia, all robed in gold and jewels, sat down to the table, her noble lord dropped a dose of opium into her cup." And so forth. The custom is so thoroughly established, that a Spaniard would no more feel any sensation in the terrors of an adventure which did not begin in Murcia, wherever it might end, than a Frenchman would have his chimney swept by any but a Savoyard. However, travellers have no right to choose. The felucca dropped in at Carthagena, shook its light cotton wings over the bluest of blue seas, and was gone, after bequeathing me to the care of the Señor landlord of the "El Rey de las Diamantes ;" Indian cacique, or the monarch of Golconda, whose effigy swung aloft in the majestic blackness of ages. The landlord received me as a potentate might have received an ambassador from a dependent state; congratulated me on being an Englishman; congratulated England on being an ally of the fairest, freest, and most powerful soil on the surface of the globe; congratulated the British army on having had the good fortune to fight along with the invincible Spanish beroes, and to take lessons from their tactics and triumphs; promised that Spain would regard her pupil at all times with a parental eye; and finished by laying the opulence of Murcia at my dispossl, and sending 758 The Conde de Ildefonzo; in for my supper an olla which not night's amusement by the loan of Next morning I ordered a calèche, But the Spanish shepherds' proverb, that "The wind never blows cold in the sheepshearing," a principle of lazy reliance on accident, which is Spanish all over, was our motto now. The calèche lay a wreck, 'tis true; but it lay in the ditch of a mansion worthy of a household of monks; large, stately, and superb. Such is fortune. If we had two sound wheels, we might have bivouacked in the forest, or been hutted at least in some deplorable inn, smelling of all the abominations of the land; have fed on salt fish, been stifled with bad tobacco; and if we escaped being stilettoed by some smuggling bravo for some imaginary point of honour, would have been sure to have parted with no small share of our peace of mind in its beds, and been plundered very sufficiently next morning in its bill. My disaster was seen from the mansion, and a crowd of valets, headed by a figure worthy of the days of Le Sage, a chamberlain, of the first dimensions, came to offer me the hospitalities of the mansion. I was only too fortunate; and gladly leaving my postilions to recover from their calamity, by the help of a vow to St Mary of Lanega, (for every hill and every vale of Spain has its presiding Goddess,) advanced to present myself before the lord of this superb establishment. I was received by the noble owner with great civility; my mishap was condoled over, and I was desired to set myself at my ease for the night. The time is not yet distant enough to make my record of his hospitality and his feelings harmless; and I therefore take the office of king, or that other fountain of honour, king-at-arms, into my competence, and give him, in addition to his weight of honours, the title of Conde de Montellana. He presented me to his Countess, a grave and majestic figure, whose dark brows and darker eyes shewed what execution might have flashed from them among the courtiers of Charles the Fourth, twenty years before. The more interesting presentation was to his daughter, a magnificent creature, uniting the graces of youth with the dignity of a queen; and seeming fit rather to rule with a sceptre, than to condescend to think of such soft arts as smiles, or such slight triumphs as subduing of the embroidered heroes of the royal circle. A still more interesting introduction was to his niece, arrived that day from her convent in the Alpuxarras, a rugged nest for so gay and lighthearted a bird. Beauty is all conventional. Nothing is truer than that the eye is three-fourths of all beauty, the fancy is often the other fourth. But still there are some constituents that form the common stock of loveliness; and if a countenance of the liveliest, most varied, and most intelligent expression,-if a shape of remarkable grace, and still in the finest flexibility of youth, and a voice that could not utter a word without convincing the ear that there was a melody of its own in the human accent, made beauty-this girl would have been beautiful in any collection of enchantresses in the circumference of the world. One of her names was Catalina, and by that she must be content to be known. The name will not develope her, more than the title which I have taken the privilege of conferring on her uncle. The Catalinas in Spain are as numerous as the lamps that burn before the little black images of the Virgin in the corners of the streets; they are incalculable. The Conde was polite, and conversible. He had been, like most of the Spanish nobles, a soldier; but, unlike most of them, he had served and travelled abroad. He had been on the staff of the Archduke Charles, on the Rhine; he had fought in Italy, where he had an estate in right of his Countess, and it was not till after he had got a sabre-wound in the head, a French bullet in the side, which made him still stoop, and a broad riband of Maria Theresa across his breast, that he sheathed his sword, and retired from camps and cannonshots, to live among his vines and fig-trees, and be the patriarch of the valley of Lanega. The evening passed pleasantly. I happened to have travelled in the countries about which the Conde felt the chief curiosity. I had seen, a few years later than he, the remarkable men of the time. This was enough for the Conde. I was an Englishman; this was enough for the Condessa, who, by some strange means or other, had imbibed an extraordinary respect for the national character. I was a stranger; and perhaps the novelty was enough for the young ladies. We talked long, much, and late. Of all meals, the most familiarising is supper. Before it was half over, we were old friends. If my entertainers were pleased, I was charmed; beauty, elegance, and wealth were before me. I could not help contrasting all this with the inn; the sulky landlord, the salt-fish, the tobacco, and the smuggler, stiletto in hand. No calèche ever tumbled to pieces under a more benignant star. But this could not go on for ever. While the Conde's eyes were beaming with hospitality, and the eyes of his circle were sparkling like a row of diamonds, with all the various lustres that Spanish eyes alone possess in the world, the toll of the neighbouring convent for matins, first reminded us that we were beginning the day; and as, even in Spain, to begin the day over a table covered with bottles of rosoglio, is not within the strict regularities of life, I made my bow for the time, and the circle rose and dissolved away like a fairy vision at sunrise. My chamber was, like every thing else under this roof, stately. Pictures and statues lined the gallery which led to my place of rest. The chamber was silk, from ceiling to floor; the tables were marble; the bed was velvet. In the garden, a fount, of Italian sculpture, threw up a spire of sparkling water above the trees. There was a moon just couching on the horizon; stars, bright with all the brightness of the south, were scattered over the sky. All was the night for a romancer, a painter, or a lover. I lingered at the casement for a while, enjoying the prospect, and thinking once more of the Venta and the abominations which I had escaped. But the landscape began to grow dim; the stars went out one by one; the moon grew small, and seemed to shake from her orbit; the murmuring of the fountain softened into a whisper. In short, I was falling fast asleep on the marble frame of the balcony. I yielded to the enemy, and plunging myself under the embroidery of my too sumptuous bed, fell into the slumber so naturally earned by a day's jolting over a Spanish highway, and under a Spanish burning sun. I should have told that I had a little companion of my travels, who never gave me any trouble-never borrowed my money-never played the inconstant, and never made me wish either him or myself at the Antipodes; this is enough to tell, that it was neither man, woman, nor child. It was a little Tuscan greyhound, honoured by his former mistress with the illustrious name of Napoleon, and sold to me by that mistress, a Duchesa too, for the sum of five zechins. The Duchesa wept, and vowed that she could not survive the parting; but she sold him notwithstanding, and put my zechins in her purse, in an agony of tears and sighs. Napoleon was beautiful, as every thing in Italy is, but the women-and honest, as every thing is, but the men. On this night he took possession of his share of my purple coverlet, without ceremony, and was in the land of dreams as soon as his master. The day's journey, the evening's hospitality, the lofty tournure of the young Condessa, and the touching gaiety of her cousin, were whirling before my brain like the pictures of a magic lantern. I was listening to some flattering speech from the noble Count, and was delighting to find its spirit transfused into the brilliant eyes, and quivering on the coral lips, of the Donna Catalina, when I thought myself suddenly transported to the inn. Then the whole abomination was round me to the life-the black-visaged hostess, the brawling muleteer, the bandit, the smugglerbut all in gigantic proportions, and all engaged in mortal quarrel; poniards were drawn, swords flashing, and clubs beating out brains. I was forced to take my share in the fray for self-defence, and played the hero, to my own astonishment. At length a tremendous grasp seized me, and I was about to return it with furious effect, when I opened my eyes, and found Napoleon sitting on my breast, and making a variety of busy efforts to bring me to my senses. I flung him off with more indignity than his merits deserved; but to recover my dream was impossible. Napoleon, like his great namesake in so many instances, had murdered sleep; he clung to me-he fawned-he growled and having tried all the arts of canine appeal, he sprang to the seat of the casement. I followed to take summary measures, and fling him out to spend his night al fresco. But my eyes no sooner glanced on the garden, than, Cielo ! what a sight! A mass of men were standing under cover of the trees, within a hundred yards of the mansion. They were evidently waiting for some signal, and waiting for some purpose of mischief. A great deal of whispering was going on, and some difference of opinion, too, as I could discover by the Spaniards' argument of the knife plucked out of the sheath, and then suddenly thrust in again, having gained its object of conviction. Clubs were waved above rough heads, and cloaks were thrown open in the energy of debate, while within I saw the glistening of swords and carbines. What was to be done? The mansion was utterly si lent; all were evidently without note of this extraordinary visitation. I held a council of war, and with Napoleon at my side, a name inspiring battle, if not victory, hurried from the chamber to apprize the Conde of his situation. But I had scarcely reached the end of the gallery, when a roar, a clash of arms, and a blaze of torches, told me that an attack had been made on the opposite side of the building. In another moment, a door burst open, and a figure with a drawn sword and a lamp in his hand, rushed up to me. Luckily I was unarmed, or, between the dimness and the surprise, we might have been engaged in single combat. However, on my springing back from the sweep of the light, it shewed me the Conde, and we congratulated each other on the timeliness of the discovery. Our business was now to rouse the domestics, whose cups must have been drugged by some emissary in the house, for to arouse them seemed next to impossible. The gallery, however, was soon peopled by the higher branches. The ladies of the mansion had speedily gathered together; all was trepidation; and, by some unaccountable affinity, I found the fair Catalina by my side, and disposed to rely prodigiously on my generalship. The English reputation on the continent is warlike, to an extravagance. The idea of an Englishman, who is not born a soldier or sailor, or who, at least, does not take to shot and shells, or to stem and stern, as naturally as the Newfoundland dog takes to the brine, is among the most inconceivable of all things. There is no possibility of persuading, arguing, or convincing the foreigner to the contrary. The Englishman who is not amphibious, or who does not inhale gunpowder smoke as the native pabulum, of his lungs is a lusus nature, or a half-caste, or no Englishman at all. My appearance, then, whatever it might add to the physical, added vastly to the moral force. There was no time to be lost. It was quite clear that a desperate attempt was about to try our courage. The assailants were unknown to the Conde. Whether an invasion of Algerines-by no means an impossible thing in Murcia, even in this nineteenth centuryan incursion of guerillas, or a troop of deserters from the army of the Isle of Leon, of whose disorders some flying reports had been spread about the country for some time, all was uncertain. In fact, nothing was clear except that the mansion was attacked, and was in imminent danger of being set on fire; for fragments of blazing wood were now flying like a bombardment against the walls and windows, and shots began to rattle. All was confusion in our troops; the valets and grooms had gathered such old muskets and fowling-pieces as they could, and were vowing, by all their saints, to blow the renegadoes on the outside to the moon. The Conde was an old soldier who had served in some of the roughest affairs of the war; he was calm and intrepid, but perplexed beyond measure at the cause of the assault. The ladies were all but terrified to death; but, to our infinite embarrassment, they determined, as they said, to die with us, and, in consequence, made it nearly a matter of certainty that we should die with them. At length, a thunder at the great gate told us that the besiegers were in earnest; and that if we were to defend ourselves, the time was come. I of course supplicated for something to do, and the Conde gave me the charge of the gate. I sallied forth with a carbine on my shoulder; a brace of pistols, as old as the Armada, in my pockets; and three stout gallegos, to compose my garrison. I planted them at the loopholes in the sides of the gate; and taking my position in the arch above, prepared for action. I love brief orders, for I never could take the trouble of comprehending any other, and this I fully believe to be the case with the majority of warriors. A superfluity of good advice on such subjects is always so much thrown away. My order of battle was, "Fire one at a time. Do not throw away a grain of powder; and to make that matter sure, do not pull a trigger until you are sure of singing the enemy's mustaches." A codicil was added, announcing a "hard dollar for the first shot that brought down its man." The night was now dark as Erebus; the moon had sunk down heavy in clouds-the wind was angrythe forest roared before the rising gusts-and the roar of the crowd without was echoed by the clamour |