ving a fair and full report of the strength, peculiarities,
and prospects of their movement.

At the London office of the sympathizers with the cause I was furnished
with the address of certain Carlists in confidential positions in
France, and letters were sent on in advance, so as to secure me a
favourable reception. Armed with a sheet of flimsy stamped in blue with
the escutcheon of Charles VII., and the legend "Secretaria Militar de
Londres," and with, what was more potent, a big credit on a
banking-house, I started afresh on the now familiar route.

Before undertaking the journey into the territory in revolt I halted at
Bayonne to procure the necessary passes. These were obtained with ease
from the Junta sitting in the Rue des Ecoles, the members of which
professed that they desired nothing so much as the presence of the
representatives of impartial foreign journals, so that the truth about
the struggle should be made known to the rest of Europe. From Bayonne I
proceeded to Biarritz, where I had a conference with the Duke de La
Union de Cuba, a warm Carlist partisan, to whom I had an introduction,
and thence I went to St. Jean de Luz, a drowsy, quaint, world-forgotten
nook. A _petit Paris_ it was called in a vaunting quatrain by some
minstrel of yore. But Brussels may be comforted. It is nothing of the
kind, but something infinitely better. The breezes from the main and the
mountains, from the Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees, conspire to supply
it with ozone. There is music in the boom of the surf as it pulsates
regularly on the velvet sands of a semicircular inlet, where dogs frisk
and youngsters gambol in the sunshine.

In a hotel on the edge of that inlet, the Fonda de la Playa, where I put
up, a young Irish gentleman named Leader was recuperating from a severe
wound in the leg. He had received it in the service of Don Carlos, in a
skirmish near Azpeitia, where he was the only man hit. He was out with a
party of the guerrilleros, and came across a company of the Madrid
troops. To encourage his own people, or rather the people with whom he
had cast in his fortunes, he went well to the front, and mounting on a
bank of earth, hurled defiance at the enemy. He was picked down by a
stray shot, and if he had been taken prisoner it is probable that he
would have paid for his temerity with his life. The Spaniards were not
clement towards foreigners who interposed in their domestic quarrel.
Leader was carried off by his c