rooms. Nothing was heard except
the scratching of steel pens on paper. The editors were seated around a
great table covered with oil-cloth; two or three, however, were writing
at small pine tables, set in the corners of the room.

By and by one who had a beard just beginning to turn gray, raised his
head, and said:--

"Tell me, Senor de Rivera, was not the motion determined upon for the
eighteenth?"

Miguel, who was writing at one of the special tables, replied without
lifting his head:--

"Senor Marroquin, I can't advise you too often to be more discreet. Try
to realize that all our heads are in danger, from the humblest, like
Senor Merelo y Garcia's, up to the most stately and glorious, like our
very worthy chief's."

The editors smiled. One of them inquired:--

"And what has become of Merelo? He has not been here at all yet."

"He can't come till twelve," replied Rivera. "From ten till twelve he is
always engaged in plotting against institutions in the Cafe del Siglo."

"I thought that he was in Levante."

"No; he goes there last from two till three."

The first speaker was the very same Senor Marroquin of perpetual memory,
Miguel's professor in the Colegio de la Merced, a born enemy of the
Supreme Creator and a man as hirsute as a biped can possibly be. This
was how he happened to be here:--

One day when Miguel was just finishing his breakfast, word was brought
to him that a gentleman was waiting to see him in the library. This
gentleman was Marroquin, who in his appearance resembled a beggar; he
was so poor, dirty, and disreputable. When he saw his old pupil, he was
deeply moved, strange as it may appear, and then told him with genuine
eloquence that he had not a shilling, and that he and his children were
starving to death, and at the end he begged him to find a place for him
on the staff of _La Independencia_.

"I am not the owner of the journal, my dear Marroquin. The only thing
that I can do for you is to give you a letter to General Count de
Rios."

He gave him the letter, and Marroquin presented himself with it at the
general's house; but he had the ill fortune to go at a most inopportune
moment when the general was raging up and down through the corridors of
his house, like one possessed, and calling up the repertoire of
objurgations for which he had been so distinguished when he was a
sergeant.

The reason was that one of his little ones had drunk up a bottle of ink,
under the impressio