ous; but what does that reck? Those cuirasses were _spolia
opima_.

And Santa Cruz?

The honest gentleman had retired into private life. His excesses had
raised such a storm of opprobrium against the Carlists that they had to
request him to desist. Lizarraga summoned him to render himself up a
prisoner. "Come and take me," replied Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz had near
two thousand followers; Lizarraga a few hundred. Lizarraga declined the
invitation. But the priest caused seven-and-twenty Carabineros, taken
prisoners at the bridge of Endarlasa, near Irun, to be shot, and this
filled the cup to overflowing. The Carlists averred they would slay him;
the Republicans vowed they would garrote him for a Madrid holiday; the
French Government declared its intention of putting him under lock and
key if it caught him within its jurisdiction. His band was disarmed "by
order of the King," and dispersed, and the Cura himself nebulously
vanished--whither we may see anon.

There was a large accretion to the population of St. Jean de Luz in
Iberian refugees, and as they sat and conversed under the foliage of the
public promenade, frequent sighs might be overheard, and remarks that if
this sort of thing were to go on, "Spain would soon be in as bad a
condition as France." At all hours there came to the beach poor exiles
of Spain, who turned their eyes sadly to the line where sky met ocean.
Of what were their thoughts--of home and friends, of the flutters of
the casino or the ecstasies of the bull-ring? If they were looking for
the Spanish fleet they did not see it, for a reason as old as the
"Critic." It was not in sight. They came down in numbers in front of my
hotel at nine o'clock on the morning of Monday, July 28th, a few days
after my arrival, when a strange yellow funnel turned the point, and a
long low Red-Roverish three-masted schooner-yacht steamed into Socoa,
the roadstead of St. Jean de Luz. If the exiles were correctly informed,
that was the Spanish fleet in a sense--the notorious Carlist privateer,
the _San Margarita_, which had recently landed arms and ammunition for
the Royalists at Lequeieto and elsewhere. She had been doing a stroke of
business in the same line that morning. In the grey dawn she had dropped
into the embouchure of the Bidassoa, at a few hundred yards from the
town of Fontarabia. The work was well and quickly done. Boats
requisitioned by friends on land put off to her, and returned laden with
bales of mercha