at
every tremor, and beating their breast with one hand, these scoundrels
robbed the poor victims with the other, not even stopping short of
murder.

"General Robles' division was occupied entirely in guarding the
destroyed quarters of the town from the depredations of these inhuman
monsters. Taken up with my duties of orderly officer, it was only in the
morning that I could assure myself of the safety of my own family. My
mother and my sisters had escaped with their lives from that ballroom,
where I had left them early in the evening. I remember those two
beautiful young women--God rest their souls--as if I saw them this
moment, in the garden of our destroyed house, pale but active, assisting
some of our poor neighbours, in their soiled ball-dresses and with the
dust of fallen walls on their hair. As to my mother, she had a stoical
soul in her frail body. Half-covered by a costly shawl, she was lying
on a rustic seat by the side of an ornamental basin whose fountain had
ceased to play for ever on that night.

"I had hardly had time to embrace them all with transports of joy when
my chief, coming along, dispatched me to the ravine with a few soldiers,
to bring in my strong man, as he called him, and that pale girl.

"But there was no one for us to bring in. A landslide had covered the
ruins of the house; and it was like a large mound of earth with only the
ends of some timbers visible here and there--nothing more.

"Thus were the tribulations of the old Royalist couple ended. An
enormous and unconsecrated grave had swallowed them up alive, in their
unhappy obstinacy against the will of a people to be free. And their
daughter was gone.

"That Gaspar Ruiz had carried her off I understood very well. But as
the case was not foreseen, I had no instructions to pursue them. And
certainly I had no desire to do so. I had grown mistrustful of my
interference. It had never been successful, and had not even appeared
creditable. He was gone. Well, let him go. And he had carried off the
Royalist girl! Nothing better. Vaya con Dios. This was not the time
to bother about a deserter who, justly or unjustly, ought to have been
dead, and a girl for whom it would have been better to have never been
born.

"So I marched my men back to the town.

"After a few days, order having been re-established, all the principal
families, including my own, left for Santiago. We had a fine house
there. At the same time the division of Robles was