III.

EL TEMBLOR.


We must leave young José among his comrades of the _hato_ for a while,
and glance at the contemporaneous doings of anointed heads, whose
destinies were strangely interwoven with his own.

Far away across the Atlantic, in the shadow of the Pyrenees, events had
been developing themselves to the consummation that should overturn a
splendid throne, shake Europe to its foundations, and electrify Spanish
America with a sympathetic current of revolution, flashing from the
pines of Oregon to the deserts of Patagonia.

The mysterious treachery of Bayonne was consummated. Joseph, brother
of Napoleon, reigned on the throne of which King Charles had been
perfidiously despoiled. Ferdinand, heir to the crown of Spain and the
Indies, had scarcely heard himself proclaimed as the seventh monarch of
that name, when he had resigned his kingly functions to a Regency, and
hastened into the snare which already held his father a captive on the
soil of France. The astounding intelligence arrived in different parts
of South America during the year 1808. The effect was everywhere alike.
One moment of utter bewilderment, an instant's reeling under the shock
of surprise, and then a magnificent outburst of loyalty from the
simple-hearted Creole population! _El Rey_, the King,--that almost
mythical sovereign, who was ignorantly adored as the personification of
wisdom and beneficence, no matter how cruelly Viceroys might misgovern,
or Captains-General oppress,--was it possible to conceive him a captive,
the signer of his own humiliation, the renouncer of his immemorial