Meanwhile, a petition to the Queen of Spain, signed by hundreds of American ladies, headed by the President's mother, was sent from New York to Madrid, and yet another to the same purpose was forwarded from London, where two ladies, famed for their instinctive horror of anything approaching self-advertisement--Mrs Ormiston Chant and the fair author of _The Sorrows of Satan_--warmly espoused the fate of the hapless Evangelina, whose adventures, in spite of a monster reception in Madison Square, attended by not less than 250,000 persons, with appropriate banners, flowers, and bands of music, fell rather flat in New York. Her gallant rescuer being a married man, Evangelina remains to this day in "maiden meditation, fancy free." But the sensation produced by this interesting case was immense. Portraits of Mlle. Cisneros were sold by the thousand, and from New York to San Francisco execration of the Spaniards rose to fever heat. Soon afterwards occurred the terrible "Maine" disaster, which, coming on the top of the Cisneros business, drove the American masses, egged on by the clamours of the "yellow press," to force the reluctant President into a strangely sudden declaration of war,--a struggle, the fate of which, even as I write, yet hangs in the balance. * * * _P.S._--Even as these pages go to press, a telegram announces the marriage of "Miss Evangelina Cisneros to one of her rescuers." [Illustration: HAVANA.] CHAPTER VI. HAVANA AND THE HAVANESE.[12]