arly transmitted to
Bolivar, were quite as much the secret of his success, as his own
genius and the valor of his troops. The constant disappointment and
defeat of the royalist arms, in the operations which were conducted in
the Province of Bogota, attested the closeness and correctness of her
knowledge, and its vast importance to the cause of the patriots.

Unfortunately, however, one of her communications was intercepted, and
the cowardly bearer, intimidated by the terrors of impending death,
was persuaded to betray his employer. He revealed all that he knew of
her practices, and one of his statements, namely, that she usually
drew from her shoe the paper which she gave him, served to fix
conclusively upon her the proofs of her offence. She was arrested in
the midst of an admiring throng, presiding with her usual grace at the
tertulia, to which her wit and music furnished the eminent
attractions. Forced to submit, her shoes were taken from her feet in
the presence of the crowd, and in one of them, between the sole and
the lining, was a memorandum designed for Bolivar, containing the
details, in anticipation, of one of the intended movements of the
viceroy. She was not confounded, nor did she sink beneath this
discovery. Her soul seemed to rise rather into an unusual degree of
serenity and strength. She encouraged her friends with smiles and the
sweetest seeming indifference, though she well knew that her doom was
certainly at hand. She had her consolations even under this
conviction. Her father was in safety in the camp of Bolivar. With her
counsel and assistance he would save much of his property from the
wreck of confiscation. The plot had ripened in her hands almost to
maturity, and before very long Bogota itself would speak for liberty
in a formidable _pronunciamento_. And this was mostly her work! What
more was done, by her agency and influence, may be readily conjectured
from what has been already written. Enough, that she herself felt that
in leaving life she left it when there was little more left for her to
do.

La Pola was hurried from the tertulia before a military court--martial
law then prevailing in the capital--with a rapidity corresponding with
the supposed enormity of her offences. It was her chief pang that she
was not hurried there alone. We have not hitherto mentioned that she
had a lover, one Juan de Sylva Gomero, to whom she was affianced--a
worthy and noble youth, who entertained for her the m