year, Catalina became thoughtful, and not very docile. At times she was
even headstrong and turbulent, so that the gentle sisterhood of St.
Sebastian, who had no other pet or plaything in the world, began to
weep in secret--fearing that they might have been rearing by mistake
some future tigress--for as to infancy, _that_, you know, is playful
and innocent even in the cubs of a tigress. But _there_ the ladies were
going too far. Catalina was impetuous and aspiring, but not cruel. She
was gentle, if people would let her be so. But woe to those that took
liberties with _her_! A female servant of the convent, in some
authority, one day, in passing up the aisle to matins, _wilfully_ gave
Kate a push; and in return, Kate, who never left her debts in arrear,
gave the servant for a keepsake a look which that servant carried with
her in fearful remembrance to her grave. It seemed as if Kate had
tropic blood in her veins, that continually called her away to the
tropics. It was all the fault of that 'blue rejoicing sky,' of those
purple Biscayan mountains, of that tumultuous ocean, which she beheld
daily from the nunnery gardens. Or, if only half of it was _their_
fault, the other half lay in those golden tales, streaming upwards even
into the sanctuaries of convents, like morning mists touched by
earliest sunlight, of kingdoms overshadowing a new world which had been
founded by her kinsmen with the simple aid of a horse and a lance. The
reader is to remember that this is no romance, or at least no fiction,
that he is reading; and it is proper to remind the reader of real
romances in Ariosto or our own Spenser, that such martial ladies as the
_Marfisa_, or _Bradamant_ of the first, and _Britomart_ of the other,
were really not the improbabilities that modern society imagines. Many
a stout man, as you will soon see, found that Kate, with a sabre in
hand, and well mounted, was but too serious a fact.

The day is come--the evening is come--when our poor Kate, that had for