devoted partisans of the Pretender
continued to reside, conforming to the established order of things, and
therefore unmolested. In most instances their private opinions were
suspected, in some actually known; but a few of them were so skilful in
concealing their political bias and partialities, as to pass for steady
and conscientious favourers of the Queen's government. Here was one and
no unimportant cause of the prolongation of the war; the number of spies
thus harboured in the very heart of the Christino camp and councils. By
these men intelligence was conveyed to the Carlists, projected
enterprises were revealed, desertion amongst the soldiery and
disaffection amongst the people, stimulated and promoted. Many of these
secretly-working agents were priests, but there was scarcely a class of
the population, from the nobleman to the peasant, and including both
sexes, in which they were not to be found. Innumerable were the plans
traversed by their unseen and rarely detectable influence. On many a
dark night, when the band of Zurbano, El Mochuelo, or some other
adventurous leader, issued noiselessly from the gates of a town, opened
expressly for their egress, to accomplish the surprise of distant post
or detachment, a light in some lofty window, of no suspicious appearance
to the observer uninformed of its meaning, served as a beacon to the
Carlists, and told them that danger was abroad. The Christinos returned
empty-handed and disappointed from their fruitless expedition, cursing
the treachery which, although they could not prove it, they were well
assured was the cause of their failure.

One of the most active, but, at the same time, of the least suspected,
of these subtle agents, was a certain Basilio Lopez, cloth-merchant in
the city of Pampeluna. He was a man past the middle age, well to do in
the world, married and with a family, and certainly, to all appearance,
the last person to make or meddle in political intrigues of any kind,
especially in such as might, by any possibility, peril his neck. Whoever
had seen him, in his soberly cut coat, with his smooth-shaven, sleek,
demure countenance and moderately rotund belly, leaning on the half-door
of his Almacen de Panos, and witnessed his bland smile as he stepped
aside to give admission to a customer or gossip, would have deemed the
utmost extent of his plottings to be, how he should get his cloths a
real cheaper or sell them at a real more than their market value.