s immediately cried out, with
one voice "Oh! something terrible, please! I do so love to be
terrified!"

Euchar took his place in the chair of the narrator, and began as
follows:--

"We have been passing through a period in which events have swept
athwart the stage of the world like a series of raging hurricanes.
Humanity, shaken to its depths, has given birth to things portentous,
even as the storm-tossed ocean casts up to the surface of its seething
surges the terrible marvels of its abysses. Whatever could be
accomplished by lion-like courage, unconquerable valour, hatred,
revenge, fury, and despair, was achieved during the Spanish war of
independence. I should like to tell you of the adventures of a friend
of mine, whom I shall call Edgar, who served in that war, under the
banners of Wellington. He had left his native place in deep, bitter
irritation, at the shame of his Fatherland, and gone to Hamburg, where
he lived in a little room which he had taken, in a retired quarter. He
had a neighbour, who lived in the next room to him, with only a wall
between them, but he knew nothing more of him than that he was an old
man, in infirm health, who never went out. He often heard him groan,
and break out into gentle pathetic lamentations; but he did not
understand the words he spoke. After a time, this neighbour begun to
walk assiduously up and down in his room, and it appeared to indicate
returning health when he tuned a guitar one day, and began to sing in a
soft voice, songs which Edgar recognized to be Spanish romances.

On being closely questioned, the landlady confided to Edgar, that his
neighbour was a French officer who had been invalided from the Romana
corps, that he was under secret espionage, and very seldom ventured to
go out.

In the middle of the night Edgar heard this Spaniard play on his guitar
more loudly than before, and begin, in powerful strangely changing
melody, the 'Profecia del Pirineo of Don Juan Baptista de Arriaja.'
There came the stanzas commencing--

"Y oye que el gran rugido,
En ya trueno en los campos de Castilla," &c.

The glowing enthusiasm with which the old gentleman's singing was
instinct, set Edgar's blood ablaze. A new world dawned on him. He knew,
now, how to arouse himself from out his sickly mood, and under an
impulse to deeds of valour, fight out the contest which was eating up
his heart. He could not resist an eager desire to make the acquaintance
o