y that had
been left upon the ground.

"What is it you mean?" asked Servadac, getting somewhat impatient.

"Hush, hush! listen!" was all Ben Zoof's reply; and he raised his finger
as if in warning.

Listening attentively, Servadac and his associates could distinctly
recognize a human voice, accompanied by the notes of a guitar and by the
measured click of castanets.

"Spaniards!" said Servadac.

"No mistake about that, sir," replied Ben Zoof; "a Spaniard would rattle
his castanets at the cannon's mouth."

"But what is the meaning of it all?" asked the captain, more puzzled
than before.

"Hark!" said Ben Zoof; "it is the old man's turn."

And then a voice, at once gruff and harsh, was heard vociferating, "My
money! my money! when will you pay me my money? Pay me what you owe me,
you miserable majos."

Meanwhile the song continued:

_"Tu sandunga y cigarro,
Y una cana de Jerez,
Mi jamelgo y un trabuco,
Que mas gloria puede haver?"_

Servadac's knowledge of Gascon enabled him partially to comprehend the
rollicking tenor of the Spanish patriotic air, but his attention was
again arrested by the voice of the old man growling savagely, "Pay me
you shall; yes, by the God of Abraham, you shall pay me."

"A Jew!" exclaimed Servadac.

"Ay, sir, a German Jew," said Ben Zoof.

The party was on the point of entering the thicket, when a singular
spectacle made them pause. A group of Spaniards had just begun dancing
their national fandango, and the extraordinary lightness which had
become the physical property of every object in the new planet made
the dancers bound to a height of thirty feet or more into the air,
considerably above the tops of the trees. What followed was irresistibly
comic. Four sturdy majos had dragged along with them an old man
incapable of resistance, and compelled him, _nolens volens_, to join
in the dance; and as they all kept appearing and disappearing above the
bank of foliage, their grotesque attitudes, combined with the pitiable
countenance of their helpless victim, could not do otherwise than recall
most forcibly the story of Sancho Panza tossed in a blanket by the merry
drapers of Segovia.

Servadac, the count, Procope, and Ben Zoof now proceeded to make their
way through the thicket until they came to a little glade, where two men
were stretched idly on the grass, one of them playing the guitar, and
the other a pair of casta