ork. He was an agile stripling, skilled in all
gymnastic exercises. He had also done some fighting with the Carlists,
and was in France on furlough, which the soldiers in the Royalist force
appeared to have no insuperable difficulty in getting. He told me there
was a large infusion of his old regiment amongst the guerrilleros, and
that they helped to bind the partisan levies in the withes of
discipline. Most of them had smelt gunpowder at Mentana and Patay. The
famous cabecilla, Saballs, had been a captain at Rome, and Captain
Wills, a Dutchman, who had been killed in a brush at Igualada, had been
sergeant-major in Sheehan's company.

There was another ex-British officer of short service, who had a
remarkably imposing and well-cultivated growth of moustache. He was a
violent doctrinaire Carlist, but suffered from a chronic malady which
prevented him from taking the field; still there was none who could plot
with a more tremendous air of mystery. He was a Carlist because it was
"the correct thing" to be one in the fashionable ring at St. Jean de
Luz, where he had settled, and because he inherited a name associated
with chivalric insurrection. For the sake of his family I shall call him
Barbarossa. He was no honour to his house, for he was an inveterate
gambler, and was not careful in discharging the obligations he wantonly
contracted. He is dead. His death was no loss to society. In fact, if
the whole host of gamblers, lock, stock and barrel, were swept by a
fairy-blast to the regions of thick-ribbed ice, the world would be the
gainer.

When I left Spain, Carlism was to be put down in a fortnight--in Madrid.
Now it threatened to last as long as a Chinese play. The Royalists--I
suppose they had earned the title to be so named by their
perseverance--had achieved numerous small successes which had raised
their _morale_, and they were being supplied with arms of precision from
abroad, and trained to their use. They had even taken some mountain-guns
from their enemy. Leader made me laugh with his accounts of Lizarraga
shouting "Artilleria al frente!" and a couple of mules, with one
wretched little piece, moving forward; and of the intimidating clatter
made by three shrunk cavaliers in cuirasses a world too wide for them,
and alpargatas, trotting up a village street. The alpargata is the
mountain-shoe of canvas, with a hempen sole, worn by the Basque
peasants. The association of surcoats of mail and rope slippers is
incongru