hey would seem to be the very results aimed at
by the most deliberate arrangement and resolve. But Bolivar, on this
occasion, was something more than ingenious and persuasive, he was
warmly earnest, and passionately eloquent. In truth, he was excited
much beyond his wont. He was stung to indignation by a sense of
disappointment. He had calculated largely on this meeting, and it
promised now to be a failure. He had anticipated the eager enthusiasm
of a host of brave and noble spirits ready to fling out the banner of
freedom to the winds, and cast the scabbard from the sword forever.
Instead of this, he found but a little knot of cold, irresolute men,
thinking only of the perils of life which they should incur, and the
forfeiture and loss of property which might accrue from any hazardous
experiments. Bolivar spoke to them in language less artificial and
much more impassioned than was his wont. He was a man of impulse
rather than of thought or principle, and, once aroused, the intense
fire of a southern sun seemed to burn fiercely in all his words and
actions. His speech was heard by other ears than those to which it was
addressed. The shrewd mind of La Pola readily conjectured that the
meeting at her father's house, at midnight, and under peculiar
circumstances, contemplated some extraordinary object. She was aware
that a tall, mysterious stranger had passed through the court, under
the immediate conduct of her father himself. Her instinct divined in
this stranger the person of the deliverer, and her heart would not
suffer her to lose the words, or if possible to obtain, to forego the
sight of the great object of its patriotic worship. Beside, she had a
right to know and to see. She was of the party, and had done them
service. She was yet to do them more. Concealed in an adjoining
apartment--a sort of oratory, connected by a gallery with the chamber
in which the conspirators were assembled--she was able to hear the
earnest arguments and passionate remonstrances of the Liberator. They
confirmed all her previous admiration of his genius and character. She
felt with indignation the humiliating position which the men of Bogota
held in his eyes. She heard their pleas and scruples, and listened
with a bitter scorn to the thousand suggestions of prudence, the
thousand calculations of doubt and caution with which timidity seeks
to avoid precipitating a crisis. She could listen and endure no
longer. The spirit of the improvisatrice