Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers eBook

and yells of savage exultation; they were sounds I shall never forget, though I did not at that time know them for what they were, or understood their meaning.  The result, however, to me was something beyond this, and worthy to have been purchased with my heart’s blood.  Barratt still breathed; spite of his mutilations he could speak; he was rational.  One only thing he demanded—­it was that his dying confession might be taken.  Two magistrates and a clergyman attended.  He gave a list of those whom he had trepanned, and had failed to trepan, by his artifices and threats, into the sacrifice of their honor.  He expired before the record was closed, but not before he had placed my wife’s name in the latter list as the one whose injuries in his dying moments most appalled him.  This confession on the following day went into the hands of the hostile minister, and my revenge was perfect.

THE SPANISH NUN.

Why is it that Adventures are so generally repulsive to people of meditative minds?  It is for the same reason that any other want of law, that any other anarchy is repulsive.  Floating passively from action to action, as helplessly as a withered leaf surrendered to the breath of winds, the human spirit (out of which comes all grandeur of human motions) is exhibited in mere Adventures, as either entirely laid asleep, or as acting only by lower organs that regulate the means, whilst the ends are derived from alien sources, and are imperiously predetermined.  It is a case of exception, however, when even amongst such adventures the agent reacts upon his own difficulties and necessities by a temper of extraordinary courage, and a mind of premature decision.  Further strength arises to such an exception, if the very moulding accidents of the life, if the very external coercions are themselves unusually romantic.  They may thus gain a separate interest of their own.  And, lastly, the whole is locked into validity of interest, even for the psychological philosopher, by complete authentication of its truth.  In the case now brought before him, the reader must not doubt; for no memoir exists, or personal biography, that is so trebly authenticated by proofs and attestations direct and collateral.  From the archives of the Royal Marine at Seville, from the autobiography or the heroine, from contemporary chronicles, and from several official sources scattered in and out of Spain, some of them ecclesiastical, the amplest proofs have been drawn, and may yet be greatly extended, of the extraordinary events here recorded.  M.

de Ferrer, a Spaniard of much research, and originally incredulous as to the facts, published about seventeen years ago a selection from the leading documents, accompanied by his palinode as to their accuracy.  His materials have been since used for the basis of more than one narrative, not inaccurate, in French, German and Spanish journals of high authority.