f them, Robert Boyd included, meet swift death in Malaga.
In such manner rushes down the curtain on them and their affair; they
vanish thus on a sudden; rapt away as in black clouds of fate. Poor
Boyd, Sterling's cousin, pleaded his British citizenship; to no purpose:
it availed only to his dead body, this was delivered to the British
Consul for interment, and only this. Poor Madam Torrijos, hearing,
at Paris where she now was, of her husband's capture, hurries towards
Madrid to solicit mercy; whither also messengers from Lafayette and the
French Government were hurrying, on the like errand: at Bayonne, news
met the poor lady that it was already all over, that she was now a
widow, and her husband hidden from her forever.--Such was the handsel of
the new year 1832 for Sterling in his West-Indian solitudes.

Sterling's friends never heard of these affairs; indeed we were all
secretly warned not to mention the name of Torrijos in his hearing,
which accordingly remained strictly a forbidden subject. His misery over
this catastrophe was known, in his own family, to have been immense. He
wrote to his Brother Anthony: "I hear the sound of that musketry; it is
as if the bullets were tearing my own brain." To figure in one's sick
and excited imagination such a scene of fatal man-hunting, lost valor
hopelessly captured and massacred; and to add to it, that the victims
are not men merely, that they are noble and dear forms known lately
as individual friends: what a Dance of the Furies and wild-pealing
Dead-march is this, for the mind of a loving, generous and vivid man!
Torrijos getting ashore at Fuengirola; Robert Boyd and others ranked
to die on the esplanade at Malaga--Nay had not Sterling, too, been the
innocent yet heedless means of Boyd's embarking in this enterprise? By
his own kinsman poor Boyd had been witlessly guided into the pitfalls.
"I hear the sound of that musketry; it is as if the bullets were tearing
my own brain!"

CHAPTER XIV. PAUSE.

These thoughts dwelt long with Sterling; and for a good while, I fancy,
kept possession of the proscenium of his mind; madly parading there, to
the exclusion of all else,--coloring all else with their own black hues.
He was young, rich in the power to be miserable or otherwise; and this
was his first grand sorrow which had now fallen upon him.

An important spiritual crisis, coming at any rate in some form, had
hereby suddenly in a very sad form come. No doubt, as youth w