lameda. The women
of our country are worth looking at during a revolution. The rouge and
pearl powder fall off, together with that passive attitude towards the
outer world which education, tradition, custom impose upon them from the
earliest infancy. I thought of your face, which from your infancy had
the stamp of intelligence instead of that patient and resigned cast
which appears when some political commotion tears down the veil of
cosmetics and usage.

"In the great sala upstairs a sort of Junta of Notables was sitting,
the remnant of the vanished Provincial Assembly. Don Juste Lopez had had
half his beard singed off at the muzzle of a trabuco loaded with slugs,
of which every one missed him, providentially. And as he turned his head
from side to side it was exactly as if there had been two men inside his
frock-coat, one nobly whiskered and solemn, the other untidy and scared.

"They raised a cry of 'Decoud! Don Martin!' at my entrance. I asked
them, 'What are you deliberating upon, gentlemen?' There did not seem
to be any president, though Don Jose Avellanos sat at the head of the
table. They all answered together, 'On the preservation of life and
property.' 'Till the new officials arrive,' Don Juste explained to me,
with the solemn side of his face offered to my view. It was as if a
stream of water had been poured upon my glowing idea of a new State.
There was a hissing sound in my ears, and the room grew dim, as if
suddenly filled with vapour.

"I walked up to the table blindly, as though I had been drunk. 'You are
deliberating upon surrender,' I said. They all sat still, with their
noses over the sheet of paper each had before him, God only knows why.
Only Don Jose hid his face in his hands, muttering, 'Never, never!' But
as I looked at him, it seemed to me that I could have blown him away
with my breath, he looked so frail, so weak, so worn out. Whatever
happens, he will not survive. The deception is too great for a man of
his age; and hasn't he seen the sheets of 'Fifty Years of Misrule,'
which we have begun printing on the presses of the Porvenir, littering
the Plaza, floating in the gutters, fired out as wads for trabucos
loaded with handfuls of type, blown in the wind, trampled in the mud? I
have seen pages floating upon the very waters of the harbour. It would
be unreasonable to expect him to survive. It would be cruel.

"'Do you know,' I cried, 'what surrender means to you, to your women, to
your child