spected Christians, who had been involved in
the same persecution; and the whole were headed by a man who appeared
suddenly amongst them, and whose fiery eloquence and martial spirit
produced, at such a season, the most fervent enthusiasm. Unhappily, the
whole details of this singular outbreak are withheld from us; only by
wary hints and guarded allusions do the Spanish chroniclers apprise us
of its existence and its perils. It is clear that all narrative of an
event that might afford the most dangerous precedent, and was alarming
to the pride and avarice of the Spanish king, as well as the pious zeal
of the Church, was strictly forbidden; and the conspiracy was hushed
in the dread silence of the Inquisition, into whose hands the principal
conspirators ultimately fell. We learn, only, that a determined and
sanguinary struggle was followed by the triumph of Ferdinand, and the
complete extinction of the treason.

It was one evening, that a solitary fugitive, hard chased by an armed
troop of the brothers of St. Hermandad, was seen emerging from a wild
and rocky defile, which opened abruptly on the gardens of a small,
and, by the absence of fortification and sentries, seemingly deserted,
castle. Behind him; in the exceeding stillness which characterises the
air of a Spanish twilight, he heard, at a considerable distance the
blast of the horn and the tramp of hoofs. His pursuers, divided into
several detachments, were scouring the country after him, as the
fishermen draw their nets, from bank to bank, conscious that the
prey they drive before the meshes cannot escape them at the last.
The fugitive halted in doubt, and gazed round him: he was well-nigh
exhausted; his eyes were bloodshot; the large drops rolled fast down his
brow; his whole frame quivered and palpitated, like that of a stag when
he stands at bay. Beyond the castle spread a broad plain, far as the eye
could reach, without shrub or hollow to conceal his form: flight
across a space so favourable to his pursuers was evidently in vain. No
alternative was left unless he turned back on the very path taken by the
horsemen, or trusted to such scanty and perilous shelter as the copses
in the castle garden might afford him. He decided on the latter refuge,
cleared the low and lonely wall that girded the demesne, and plunged
into a thicket of overhanging oaks and chestnuts.

At that hour, and in that garden, by the side of a little fountain, were
seated two females: the