more Santa Cruz wandered among the mountains, hiding by day in a peasant's hut, travelling by night knee-deep in snow, crossing and recrossing the frontier whenever he had occasion to do so, holding frequent interviews with Carlist chiefs near Ainhoa, Sarre, and other villages on the French side of the Pyrenees, rousing the apathetic, deciding the hesitating, fanning the flame of the enthusiastic, collecting money, providing resources, and otherwise labouring for the triumph of the cause with which he was now bound up, body and soul. He was denounced to the Madrid Government as the most active and the most dangerous agent of the Pretender, and one whose name had even then great weight with the party.

Representations of the most pressing kind were repeatedly made to the French Government. It was complained that the Prefect of the Lower Pyrenees showed great apathy in carrying out the orders of his superiors for the arrest of these agents, which amounted to connivance. The Prefect and SubPrefects of the department were remonstrated with, and became more vigilant. The police were sent about in all directions: but it was by mere accident that he was at last captured, after many hairbreadth escapes. He had been for a few days in Socoa, a little marine town situated at the entrance of the bay of St Jean de Luz, near the group of rocks against which the waves of the Cantabrian ocean are broken. He was waiting a favourable moment to visit the environs of Bayonne, where he had appointed to meet a personage of some importance with whom he had been in communication. As he was crossing the bridge of the Nivelle which connects the suburban village of Ciboure with St Jean de Luz, he encountered two gendarmes who evidently did not know him, and who at first

seemed disposed to let him pass without asking questions. They, however, turned back the moment he was about to clear the bridge, and called upon him to produce his "papers." "My papers!" he said readily; "with pleasure-here they are," putting his hand into his pockets, one after the other. Again and again they were searched and turned inside out, but no papers were there, as Santa Cruz of course well knew. With a look of the deepest vexation, he had, he said, through forgetfulness, left them behind at Ciboure or Socoa; and his manner was so earnest that the gendarmes, though not easily deceived in such matters, were thrown off their guard, and had little doubt that the stranger was really in possession of the necessary documents, and was a bonâ fide traveller. While they were parleying, the attention of one of the gendarmes was attracted to an empty canoe floating down the stream, and his comrade was exchanging a few words with an acquaintance who happened to come up at the moment. Santa Cruz dashed by them, and began to run with the utmost speed towards St Jean de Luz. The idlers who were lounging about clapped their hands and laughed heartily on seeing a Spanish priest running as if for his life, and followed hard, after a few instants' surprise, by two gendarmes, whose heavy jack-boots and loose accoutrements were not favourable for this sort of exercise. The lower orders of the French are seldom ready or willing to lend a hand to the guardians of the peace in capturing an offender: he continued to give chase for half an hour, amid the cheers of men and boys; and but for the intervention of two peasants who were coming in an opposite direction with a cart and oxen, and who probably thought that the runaway was a thief, or it may be something worse, dis

guised in clerical habiliments, the gendarmes would have been baffled, as was the officer at Hernialde. He was overtaken and lodged that night in the guard-house; the next day he was conducted to the citadel of Bayonne, and thence sent on under escort to Nantes.

At Nantes Santa Cruz was not destined to remain long. Scarcely had Don Carlos made his second appeal to the Spanish people in 1872-which was responded to by some thousands of partisans, though still scantily supplied with armswhen Santa Cruz once more appeared in the mountains. He crossed the frontier, and when on Spanish soil offered his services as chaplain to a band of about four hundred Guipuzcoans, commanded by one Recindo. The vicissitudes during this attempt, the disastrous combats of Oñate and Mañaria, and the defeat and dispersion of Orosquieta, are of too recent occurrence to be forgotten. They were followed by the negotiations between Serrano and some of the leading Carlists of Biscay, and the Convention of Amorovieta, by which, as was believed, the cause of Don Carlos was ruined for ever. The main body of the partisans dispersed in all directions; many of them hid their arms in places only known to themselves, and returned to their homes, sad and sorrowful enough, but by no means despairing. Of the chiefs, several who refused to submit made their way to France, and were at once removed to the interior; others remained in concealment close to the frontier, but still on Spanish soil; and as for Don Carlos, none except a very few of his intimates could tell what had become of him. For some time it was rumoured that he had died of his wounds, aggravated by a fall from a horse. Others reported that he had left Spain, and that the danger he had gone through in that combat disgusted him with the

part of Pretender; and, in fact, that he had resigned in favour of his younger and more energetic brother, Don Alfonso. Persons who had been or who professed to be devoted to his cause, seemed now disposed to abandon it, and spoke in bitter terms of the Prince whose pusillanimity had ruined and disgraced it. There was, perhaps, great exaggeration in what was said about him; probably they who censured him most severely after that defeat, did so to justify their own too ready assent to the Convention of Amorovieta; and we all know how rarely people are just or tolerant towards the unfortunate.

The main body of the Carlists of Guipuzcoa was indeed driven from its position and broken up, but parties of a hundred, or half that number, persisted in carrying on the guerilla in the fastnesses of Navarre. Santa Cruz was one of those who escaped after the defeat of Orosquieta, and we soon find him again in France. In France he remained but a short time; for, knowing that the struggle was still carried on in spite of all difficulties, he returned to Spain, and, as before, proffered his services as chaplain. This time the cause of the Pretender was manifestly gaining ground; the bands were increasing in number, and spreading throughout Biscay, and had actually hemmed in a column of troops, among whom the disaffection which was rapidly dissolving the Spanish army had not yet reached, in the Amescoas. It happened that in one of the forays Santa Cruz was cut off from the party to which he was attached, and taken prison

answered the other, "there is nothing more to be said but to recommend you to make your peace with heaven, for in a few hours you shall be shot." "So be it: it is a consolation to know that I die in a righteous cause." His arms were bound with cords, he was thrown upon a mule, conducted under a strong escort to a neighbouring village, and locked up in a room in the upper storey of a house, next to a loft where maize was stored, and then his bonds were loosened. From this room, which was to serve as a capilla or chapel, where the condemned criminal spends his last night, he was to be taken next morning for execution. The house was ill guarded, for the detachment, tired and worn out by marching and countermarching in pursuit of an enemy they could never come up with, had moreover to guard against surprise in the village church, and could spare but few men for the prisoner. It was rumoured, too, that some of the soldiers were not over solicitous as to his safe custody. It spread like wildfire through the village and the country round that the priest of Hernialde was in the hands of his enemies, and already in capilla. All the inhabitants, women as well as men, were Carlists, and of course friends to the prisoner, whom they had known from childhood. He saw a group of them as he was led to his prison, and threw out a signal which they well understood, and which escaped the notice of his guards. He entered his room, and after partaking of refreshment-for it is considered a sacred duty to give a prisoner under such circumstances whatever he may have a fancy for-he desired to be left alone, to prepare for death. On inspecting the bed on which he was to sleep his last, he saw it was furnished with the usual allowance of sheets of strong coarse linen. No time was to be lost,

as the officer of the guard would soon make his visit. He set to work, and made a rope of the sheets, which he cut into proper lengths. While his guards were eating their rations at the door below, Santa Cruz quietly opened the small window, the only one in the room, which was at the back, looking into a garden planted with fruit-trees, made fast the rope to an iron bar which ran across over the window-frame, slid down, and, when within three or four feet of the ground, found himself in the arms of his friends, who had understood his signal, and were waiting for him. In half an hour the sergeant of the guard made his visit, and, to his consternation (at least apparently), found that his prisoner was gone. The open window and the improvised rope told which way he had passed. The officer sent out as many men as he could spare in pursuit of the fugitive, and spent the greater part of the night searching every house in the village-but in vain. Santa Cruz's hiding-place was indeed not far off: it was a marsh or swamp covered over with reeds and bulrushes, and in this he remained for eight or ten hours, up to the neck in water. When he saw that the coast was clear he emerged from this unpleasant bath, and made his way to the hut of a woodcutter, which had already been more than once searched by the soldiers, so that it was probable it would not again be visited. The woodcutter, who, by the way, was more Carlist than Don Carlos himself, gave him a few dollars.

The next people heard of him was that he was again across the frontier, living quietly in some obscure village not far from Cambo, in the Basque country. Those narrow escapes from certain death, his indomitable courage, pushed to rashness, and the ingenuity of his plans, soon gave him a certain celebrity among the Royalists.

The moment soon came for him to exercise a weighty influence among the champions of the cause which he had from conviction embraced, and to which he was devoting his whole energies. In spite of the occasional dispersion of petty bands in divers parts, the Convention of Amorovieta, which in truth chiefly concerned Biscay, the discouragement of many friends of the cause, and the equivocal conduct of the Prince himself, for whom they had taken the field, or more than half ruined themselves and their families by large gifts of money-Saballs, with the desperate tenacity characteristic of the Catalan, would not admit, however appearances might be, that the cause was hopeless. It is true that in Biscay and a portion of Guipuzcoa and Alava order seemed to be restored; but Saballs continued to hold his ground against all the force the Madrid Government could send against him. And whilst the official journal told, according to its wont, lie after lie-that he was driven ignominiously, and with great loss, across the frontier-that the remnant of his band and himself were, on touching the French soil, disarmed, and arrested by the French authorities, and sent on as prisoners to Perpignan-and that the struggle was now really at an end in the north-east as well as in the Basque provinces, Saballs was not only holding his own with far inferior resources, but was actually beating, one after the other, the dunces who dared to face him. Santa Cruz, too, never despaired—indeed, he seemed not to know what despair was. Even in the worst days he had never faltered for an instant in his belief of final success, and he now saw that he must rouse once more the old spirit of Guipuzcoa. "Had I but fifty men," he wrote to his friends "but fifty resolute fellows to follow me, I should not hesitate to cross the frontier, and try the game again."

He dis

His wish was satisfied. appeared on the 1st of December 1872; and while the police agents of the Spanish Government were confining their vigilance to Bayonne and St Jean de Luz, in the neighbourhood of which he was supposed to be, the first news the public had of him was, that he was preaching the "Holy War" in every village of Guipuzcoa, levying contributions, and stopping trains almost within sight of San Sebastian; and the Government found, to their deep mortification, that Serrano's diplo macy had gone for nothing, and that the civil war had broken out with more vigour than ever in the northwest. This last audacious act of Santa Cruz was a death-blow to the dynasty of Savoy. The excitement was intense on both sides; the Radicals were furious, the hopes of the Carlists stronger than ever, and their enthusiasm more ardent. It spread from village to village, and the cry "To arms! to arms!" sent out by Goiriena from Biscay, and by Ollo from Navarre, was responded to from the mountains. It was on this occasion that Santa Cruz put forth all his powers of persuasion, and all his zeal. He went from town to town, from valley to valley, from house to house, exhorting, encouraging, remonstrating, and threatening. He harangued congregations in the old Basque tongue, so full of imagery, as they left the church after mass: he called upon the young men who could be spared from the labours of the field, to defend, with arms in their hands, "the cause of God, religion, their king, and the ancient independence of their native province.' He did more than preach. He laid aside the cassock, and put himself as a chief at the head of some 500 men ; and by him these hasty levies were soon made soldiers well fitted for the warfare in which the Spaniards of the mountain excel.

Not half the number were armed or equipped when he first mustered them. Before long all had excellent muskets, and a plentiful supply of ammunition; and the uniforms of the mobilised nationals of France, laid aside after the peace with Germany, were bought up by his agents. The compact band was organised, armed, and equipped out of resources raised by Santa Cruz himself in France and Spain.

The partisans who acknowledged the Guipuzcoan priest as their leader go by the name of the Black Legion-Legion negra. It is composed of vigorous young men, all natives of the province, many of whom have rarely passed the night in a town. Their absolute devotion to their chief is proved by the fact that not one was tempted by the reward of 50,000 reals (£500) offered for the capture of Santa Cruz, dead or alive; and 50,000 reals are a fortune to a Basque peasant. The most complete order and discipline are enforced in his little army. In the evening, when the day's work is over, the enemy distant, the hour for repose at hand, and the rations eaten, at a given signal those rough men assemble round their chief, once more their priest, to hear prayers read, in which they all join. Their prayer is for "King Charles VII.; for Spain, now delivered over to the demon of anarchy; for those who have died in battle, and for those who may yet fall in the cause of the king." And then, wrapped up in their mantas, which serve as cloak or blanket, they lay themselves down to sleep, each with his loaded musket by his side, ready to start up at the slightest notice; while men are stationed as sentries at regular intervals, to give warning of approaching danger. Of the famous Curé Merino, it used to be said that he slept as soundly on horseback as in a bed of down. Santa Cruz has

acquired the power of sleeping standing, his back to a rock, and his head and hands resting on a thick knotted stick which he seldom lays aside. But even this he does not enjoy until he has made his rounds, visited his sentries, and sees that everything is in perfect order for the night, and in security. After two or three hours' sleep, he is again on foot, gives the signal, when every man starts up ready to go whithersoever their chief orders without asking questions. He is never tired, and yet no one gets over more ground than he, or in less time. No one can say exactly where he is. He has been known to spend part of a night in a village on the extreme frontier, and when his pursuers reach it, knocked up with fatigue, they learn that he is twenty or thirty miles in the interior. Every officer sent out after him comes back as he went, after a wildgoose chase for many a league. He seems to know by instinct when and where an ambuscade is laid; and not only does he baffle his pursuers, but often turns their own ambuscade against them.

Before the guerilla warfare commenced, while Santa Cruz was leading a quiet life in his parish of Hernialde, he was of a slight delicate frame, and looked like an invalid. Since then he has grown stout and strong: exercise, constant living in the open air, and ever-recurring danger, he seems to thrive on. The abstemiousness he had always practised he has never departed from. In person he is under the middle stature; his features dark and irregular, and rather commonplace; but his small black eyes, deep set, glow from out thick eyebrows, and indicate the fiery energy that burns within. When he took the field as a chief of partisans, he, as has been observed, quite laid aside the clerical costume; for the long black cassock, the black cloak,