tillery totally
inadequate to the reduction of so strong a town, he sat down before
Bilboa. Two twelve-pounders and one six-pounder, two brass fours, two
howitzers and a mortar, were all that he had to oppose to the strong
defences and forty or fifty guns with which the capital of Biscay was
provided. There was also a great lack of certain descriptions of
ammunition. For the mortar there were only six-and-thirty shells; and to
add to the misfortunes of the attacking party, their two largest guns,
the twelve-pounders, burst on the very first day of the siege. During
the whole of that day and night, Zumalacarregui neither ate nor slept;
and on the morrow, which was the 15th of June, he wrote a letter to the
headquarters of Don Carlos, then at Durango, informing the ministers,
that owing to the immense disproportion between his means of attack and
the enemy's powers of defence, he expected it would be necessary to
raise tire siege.

After sending off this despatch, a great weight seemed removed from the
mind of Zumalacarregui, and he went down to the batteries. With the view
of observing whether the Bilbainos had made any repairs or thrown up
works in the course of the night, he ascended to the first floor of a
house situated near the sanctuary of Our Lady of Begona, and from the
balcony began to examine the enemy's line. Whilst standing there, a
bullet struck him on the right leg, about two inches from the knee. Nine
days afterwards he was dead--killed, there can be little doubt, less by
the wound or its effects than by the gross ignorance of his medical
attendants. Three Spanish doctors, a young English surgeon, and a
_curandero_, or quack, named Petriquillo, whom Zumalacarregui had known
from his youth, and in whose skill he had great confidence, were called
in. The Englishman, however, returned after two days to the squadron to
which he was attached, giving as his opinion, which agreed with that of
Don Carlos's own surgeon, one Gelos, that in a fortnight Zumalacarregui
would be on horseback again. Whilst Petriquillo was applying ointments
and frictions, and a doctor of medicine cramming the patient with drugs,
Gelos and another surgeon kept tormenting the wound with their probes.
The wounded man's general health, already affected by the various
annoyances he had recently experienced, began to give way; and at last,
within three or four hours after the extraction of the ball, an
operation that appears to have been perfo