youth of Araure had become a naturalized son of the Plains.  Soon few were able like young Jose to break an untried steed; few wielded more dexterously the lasso, or could drive with more unerring force the jagged lance into the side of a galloping bull.  Clad in poncho and calzones, he scoured the vast plain of La Calzada, acquiring, at the same time with manual dexterity and physical hardihood, the affections, still more important, of the wild Llaneros with whom only he associated.  The lad of eighteen, scarcely two years a denizen of the Plains, possessed all the influence and authority of the hoariest Llanero; and now the predictions ran that this daring Jose Antonio would one day be the most successful cattle-farmer in Venezuela!

III.

EL TEMBLOR.

We must leave young Jose 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 rights?  And Ferdinand, the young monarch of whom so little was known and so much expected,—­he, too, a voluntary prisoner, while a Frenchman reigned in Madrid?  This was news, indeed, to bewilder nations who had hitherto remained content in infantile tutelage, unconscious, undesirous, of the rights of men!  Addresses, fervent with loyalty, were dispatched to Spain, embodying vows of eternal affection towards the King, and of detestation of Joseph, the usurper.  French residents in Venezuela were publicly execrated by the excited Creoles; the French flag was insulted, and the French messengers were glad to escape with their lives from the hands of the infuriated Colonists.  No Spanish monarch ever had a firmer hold upon the Indies than Ferdinand VII. when Spain was lost to him in July and August, 1808.