among them the _Escrivam da Camara_, and one of the most respectable inhabitants of the place, who happened to be in the room with her when the tumult took place. They had been seen from an opposite house each to take a musket and load it: ... this they acknowledged that they had done; but they had taken no part in the disturbance, nor even gone into the street. It was argued that they could not have loaded those guns with any other intention than that of discharging them against the French troops, and therefore they had incurred the penalty of death. That sentence was passed against them; and the uncle of the _Escrivam_, being one of the magistrates of the town, was ordered and compelled by Loison to be present at the execution! Five of the condemned persons took the alarm in time, and escaped. The surgeon leaped from a window, and broke his leg: he was carried to the place of butchery upon a hand-barrow, covered with a piece of sacking. While the execution was going on, the Prince of Salm Kirburg, a young officer in the French service, lifted up the cloth to see what was under it: the sight shocked him, and he said to the French general it was monstrous to bring a man in such a condition to suffer death, ... let them heal him first, and then do with him what they would. ♦NEVES, CH. 30.♦ This intercession availed: the surgeon was remanded to the hospital, and Loison was content with having seen nine men put to death for an affray in which not a single life had been lost. The place where this tragedy was perpetrated is a little town, containing not more than three hundred inhabitants; for its baths and for the beauty of the surrounding country it was frequented by strangers and invalids, and more wealth and more comforts were to be found there than in any other of the provincial towns. In such a place, where every one of the victims was known to the whole neighbourhood, and all had their nearest relations and connexions upon the spot, it may well be conceived what horror and what deep and inextinguishable hatred this bloody execution would excite. The hatred Junot despised; ... Buonaparte prided himself upon setting the feelings of mankind at defiance, and systematically outraging them for the purpose of displaying his power; and in this, as in every thing else, his generals were his faithful agents. The murders at Caldas were committed upon this system, merely to strike terror through the country.... Junot had refrained from making such an exhibition at Lisbon after the riot which the first act of open usurpation provoked, because there were native troops in the city; the population of a great capital would become formidable if it were made desperate; and, moreover, there was the English squadron in sight. But an opportunity had been watched for when it might be done safely and with more effect; and an affair which the nearest general passed over at the time as unworthy of serious notice was made the pretext.