The increasing horror of the inhabitants, as they collected the melancholy details of the morning, would have accomplished that end, without any farther effort on the part of the oppressors. The bodies of some of their victims seen in several places; the wounded that were met about the streets; the visible anguish of such as missed their relations; and the spreading report that many were awaiting their fate at the Retiro, so strongly and painfully raised the apprehensions of the people, that the streets were absolutely deserted long before the approach of night. Every street-door was locked, and a mournful silence prevailed wherever I directed my steps. Full of the most gloomy ideas, I was approaching my lodgings by a place called Postígo de San Martin, when I saw four Spanish soldiers bearing a man upon a ladder, the ends of which they supported on their shoulders. As they passed near me, the ladder being inclined forward, from the steepness of the street, I recognized the features of my townsman and acquaintance, Daoiz, livid with approaching death. He had lain wounded since ten in the morning, in the place where he fell. He was not quite insensible when I met him. The slight motion of his body, and the groan he uttered as the inequality of the ground, probably, increased his pain, will never be effaced from my memory. A night passed under such impressions, baffles my feeble powers of description. A scene of cruelty and treachery exceeding all limits of probability, had left our apprehensions to range at large, with scarcely any check from the calculations of judgment. The dead silence of the streets since the first approach of night, only broken by the trampling of horses which now and then were heard passing along in large parties, had something exceedingly dismal in a populous town, where we were accustomed to an incessant and enlivening bustle. The _Madrid cries_, the loudest and most varied in Spain, were missed early next morning; and it was ten o’clock before a single street-door had been open. Nothing but absolute necessity could induce the people to venture out.