earest of which was several leagues distant, whilst the road to it
lay through a wild and difficult country, entirely unknown to Luis, and
containing a population devoted to Don Carlos.

It was three in the afternoon. Count Villabuena leaned over the balcony
of his apartment, and gazed musingly into the street of the little
village. The scene that offered itself to him was one that at any other
moment might have fixed his attention, although he was now too much
pre-occupied to notice its picturesque details. The rays of the August
sun fell in a broad flood of light upon the scattered houses of the
hamlet, making the flint and granite of their walls to glitter again;
the glare being only here and there relieved by a scanty patch of
shadow, thrown by some projecting wall, or by the thick foliage of a
tree. The presence of the Carlist troops caused an unusual degree of
bustle and animation in the village. Many of the houses had for the time
been converted into shops and taverns; in the former, tobacco, fruit,
sardines, and other soldier's luxuries, were exposed for sale on a
board in front of the window; whilst in the latter, huge pig-skins, of
black and greasy exterior, poured forth a dark stream of wine, having at
least as much flavour of the tar with which the interior of its leathern
receptacle was besmeared, as of the grape from which the generous liquid
had been originally pressed. Through the open windows of various houses,
glimpses were to be caught of the blue caps, strongly marked
countenances, and fierce mustaches of the Carlist soldiers; their
strangely-sounding Basque oaths and ejaculations mingling with the clack
of the castanets and monotonous thrum of the tambourine, as they
followed the sunburnt peasant girls through the mazes of the Zorcico,
and other national dances. Hanging over the window-sills, or suspended
from nails in the wall, were the belts, which the soldiers had profited
by the day's halt--no very frequent occurrence with them--to clean and
pipeclay, and then had hung to dry in the sun. Here, just within the
open door of a stable, were men polishing their musket-barrels, or
repairing their accoutrements; in another place a group, more idly
disposed, had collected in some shady nook, and were playing at cards or
morra; whilst others, wrapped in their grey capotes, their heads resting
upon a knapsack or doorstep, indulged in the sound and unbroken slumber
which their usually restless and dangerous