individuals were accompanied, added to the tumult. During this time we
pursued our way silently, more dead than alive. It was two o'clock in
the morning. All at once we saw a faint light in a solitary house; it
was like a light-house for the mariner in the midst of the tempest, and
the only means of safety which remained to us. Arrived at the door of
the farm, we knocked and asked for hospitality. The inmates, very little
reassured, feared that we were thieves, and did not hurry themselves to
open to us.

Impatient at the delay, I cried out, as I had received authority to do
so, "In the name of the King, open to us!" They obeyed an order thus
given; we entered pell-mell, and in the greatest haste, men and mules,
into the kitchen, which was on the ground-floor; and we hurried to
extinguish the lights, in order not to awaken the suspicions of the
bandits who were seeking for us. Indeed, we heard them, passing and
repassing near the house, vociferating with the whole force of their
lungs against their unlucky fate. We did not quit this solitary house
until broad day, and we continued our route for Tortosa, not without
having given a suitable recompense to our hosts. I wished to know by
what providential circumstance they happened to have a lamp burning at
that unseasonable hour. "We had killed a pig," they told me, "in the
course of the day, and we were busy preparing the black puddings." Had
the pig lived one day more, or had there been no black puddings, I
should certainly have been no longer in this world, and I should not
have the opportunity to relate the story of the robbers of Oropeza.

Never could I better appreciate the intelligent measure by which the
constituent assembly abolished the ancient division of France into
provinces, and substituted its division into departments, than in
traversing for my triangulation the Spanish border kingdoms of