hat, sir; if I cannot weather upon any Spaniard that ever
went unhanged, either Creole or old Castilian, I'll agree to go to the
mines for life."

"Don't be too rash, my dear boy; though the Spaniards are only
courageous behind shot-proof walls, and when they number three to one,
they are deceitful as well as cruel; and, if their suspicions are once
excited, they will murder you at once, and her too, poor girl! and think
they are doing God service, because you are both Protestants."

"I can only repeat, trust to my prudence and management; I have too much
at stake to hazard it lightly."

"Then remember, Charles, we sail Wednesday evening: it will be
star-light, but not too dark to see your way. I will defer sailing till
eleven o'clock, if that will suit your schemes."

"It will exactly; or if you sail the moment I return, so much the
better."

With these words, they separated--Morton, overjoyed at the completion of
his preliminary arrangements, all night, like Peter Pindar's dog,

"lay winking,
And couldn't sleep for thinking."

The appointed day at length arrived; but the destinies, who had hitherto
spun the thread of the two lovers' fate as smooth and even as a
whale-line yarn, now began to fill it full of _kinks_. Well did the
ancients represent them as three haggard, blear-eyed, wrinkled,
spiteful, old maids, who would not allow any poor mortal to live or die
comfortably, and who took a malicious pleasure in disturbing "the course
of true love." The inexorable Atropos brandished her scissors, and at
one snip severed the thread asunder.

Daring the night there had been a tremendous thunder-squall, and the
morning showed huge "double-headed" clouds, mustering in different parts
of the horizon, and, apparently, waiting some signal to bid them
commence operations; others, dark and suspicious looking, but of a less
dense consistence, were seen scampering across the firmament in all
directions, like aids-de-camp before a general engagement; the
land-breeze had been interrupted by the night-squall, and the wind, what
little there was, blew from every point of the compass but the usual
one; the shags, that tenanted the top of Pedro Blanco, seemed unusually
busy, as if anticipating a change of weather; and, in short, every thing
announced that the delightful, salubrious, dry season had come to an
end, and the empire of continual rain, and drizzle, and cloud, and mud,
and putrid fevers, and rheumatism, an