"Dan, my dear old boy, how little you thought when we parted at the close of that last agreeable visit of a week, which I paid you the other day, that within a month I should be "cribbed, cabined, and confined" in the infernal hole of a dungeon from which I indite this. I wish you would send the Spanish minister a case of that very old Madeira of yours, which he professes to prefer to the wines of his own country, and tell him the silly scrape I have got myself into, if indeed it be not too late, for they talk of sending me to "the bourne" to-morrow. However, one never can believe a word these rascals say, so I write this in the hope that they are lying as usual,--and am, my dear old school-mate, your affectionate friend, ----.' For once the absence of friends proved a real blessing. Had the captain been occupied by domestic considerations, he never would have invented so valuable an ally as was thus extemporised, and he was rewarded for his shrewd device on the following morning, by finding himself the only solitary individual of all the party allowed to 'stand over.' In a couple of hours Lopez and his companions had gone to the bourne, to which our captain so feelingly alluded; and when, at last, the trick was discovered, the crisis was past, and the Spanish Government finally condemned him to two years' confinement in chains in the dungeon at Ceuta, which was afterwards commuted to eighteen months. He had just returned from this dismal abode in time once more to gratify the adventurous propensities which had already so nearly cost him his life; and it is due to him to say, that even the daring and reckless spirits by whom he was surrounded, agreed in saying that he placed an unusually low estimate on that valuable possession." There is little to add to the history of filibusterism, which may be ranked among the dead industries or the lost arts, just as one chooses to regard it. Contrary to the predictions of the prophets, the disbandment of a million of men at the end of the American Civil War was effected without trouble. The European Powers breathed more freely when it was accomplished, satisfied that the aggressive "Yankee" was not so grasping as he had been painted. Maximilian of Mexico slept peacefully, and his late unruly subjects renewed their fraternal quarrels, undisturbed by interference from abroad, and finally settled into uninteresting peace and prosperity. Filibusterism died because, in sooth, it had no longer a reason for being. To "extend the area" of an abolished slavery were as paradoxical as Quixotic. Nevertheless, the peculiar institution chanced to prove the cause of yet one final, fallacious, and ghastly episode.