epressing them, and then, furious and alarmed at the imminence of the
peril they had so narrowly escaped, inflicted the most terrible punishment
on the unsuccessful mutineers. Eight hundred prisoners had been secured in
the Matanzas Jail; of these two hundred were shot without trial, the
remainder, for the most part, strangled in their dungeons. The meaning of
the Spanish word _Matanzas_ is "a place of slaughter," and such, indeed,
the town became. Placido, the chief of the conspiracy, made a tremendous
resistance before he was taken. "He fired three pistols, killing or
wounding a man at each discharge, and then hacked and hewed away with his
sword, speedily making for himself a ring of more than its span, and
clearing a space around him as rapidly as an Utreran bull when he rushes
into the circus. But a soldier's musket soon brought him to the ground,
and bleeding and faint he was flung into the Matanzas carcel."

As the prisoners refused to a man to make disclosures, torture was
resorted to. The lash was applied till they confessed or fainted. Most of
them yielded, the plot was acknowledged to be of ancient date, and to have
Placido at its head.

Placido bore, with the resolution of a stoic, the rude and unsparing
stripes with which his broad shoulders and back were speedily covered. Not
a groan nor a sigh escaped him; but he fainted away at last from loss of
blood, and with such little apparent change, that the executioners
continued to flog for some time after he was senseless. He was loosed from
the triangles, and tied to a neighbouring stake, after the mummery of a
five minutes' court-martial. He was still senseless when bound to the
stake--lifeless, for all that his _verdugos_ knew to the contrary. Ere he
received the fusillade, he recovered from his fainting fit sufficiently to
exclaim, in an audible tone. "_Los dias de la esclavitud son contados!_"
"The days of slavery are numbered."

A horrible account, but doubtless a correct one. Our author seems to have
been in the south of Spain at the time of the Matanzas insurrection, and
consequently in the right place to get at the true particulars of the
affair.

In the chapters on the Spanish Army, &c., although amusing enough, we do
not consider the English resident to have been so successful as in most
other parts of his work. We would caution him against believing, or at any
rate expecting others to believe, the marvels recorded by Spanish gazettes
of Spanish a