of the first man he saw before him. They rolled over together. Byrne’s hazy intention was to break through, to fly up the mountain path and come back presently with Gonzales’ men to exact an exemplary vengeance. He fought furiously till a tree, a house, a mountain, or heaven itself seemed to crash down upon his head—and he knew no more.

Here Mr Byrne describes in detail the skilful manner in which he found his broken head bandaged, informs us that he had lost a great deal of blood, and ascribes the preservation of his sanity to that circumstance. He sets down Gonzales’ profuse apologies in full too. For it was Gonzales who, tired of waiting for news from the English, had come down to the inn with half his band, on his way to the sea. ‘His Excellency,’ he explained, ‘rushed out with fierce impetuosity, and more-over was not known to us for a friend, and so we,’ etc., etc., etc. When asked what had become of the witches, he only pointed his finger silently to the ground, then voiced calmly a moral reflection: ‘The passion for gold is pitiless in the very old, señor,’ he said. ‘No doubt in former days they put many a solitary traveller to sleep in the archbishop’s bed.’

‘There was also a gipsy girl there,’ said Byrne feebly from the improvised litter on which he was being carried to the coast by a squad of guerilleros.

‘It was she who winched up that infernal machine, and it was she too who lowered it that night,’ was the answer.

‘But why? Why?’ exclaimed Byrne. ‘Why should she wish for my death?’

‘No doubt for the sake of your Excellency’s coat buttons,’ said politely the saturnine Gonzales. ‘We found those of the dead mariner concealed on her person. But your Excellency may rest assured that everything that is fitting has been done on this occasion.’

Byrne asked no more questions. There was still another death which was considered by Gonzales as ‘fitting to the occasion.’ The one-eyed Bernardino, stuck against the wall of his wine-shop, received the charge of six escopettas^* into his breast. As the shots rang out, the rough bier with Tom’s body on it, carried by a bandit-like gang of Spanish patriots, passed down the ravine to the cove, where two boats from the ship were waiting for what was left on earth of her best seaman.

Mr Byrne, very pale and weak, stepped into the boat which carried the body of his humble friend. For it was decided that Tom Corbin should be sent down to his rest far out in the Bay of Biscay. The officer took the tiller and, turning his head for a last look at the shore, saw, moving diagonally on the grey hillside, something which he made out to be a little man in a yellow hat mounted on a mule—that mule without which the fate of Tom Corbin would have remained for ever an insoluble mystery.