"This announcement having taken some effect, the newspapers went on to inform the public that the famous Countess was shortly about to enter religion; the best informed went so far as to name the day on which she would take the veil. "But on the appointed day, behold a third and startling item of news! "Senora Lola Montez, yielding to that instinct of inconstancy so strong in her sex, is announced to have chosen the Opera instead of the Cloister. "That evening the theatre was crowded to suffocation, and the following days the receipts were enormous." De Mirecourt, who pronounced young Heald's desire to marry Lola in due and proper form, _idee d'Anglais_, must be allowed his sneer. We who know in what spirit the adventuress ended her career, and to what strange impulses she was subject, may hesitate to dismiss her momentary attraction to the cloister as a mere advertising manoeuvre. The woman was disillusioned, sore at heart, and world-weary; her restlessness bespeaks a mind ill at ease; her beauty showed signs of fading, she had no home, no ties, no kindred. It is likely that for a moment her resolve to end her days in the supposed tranquillity of the convent was genuine enough. It passed; as yet the joy of living was too strong in her to be crushed down. XXIX IN THE TRAIL OF THE ARGONAUTS The Creole City at that time swarmed with gold-seekers on their way to or returning from the newly-found Ophir of the Occident. Though the first headlong rush to California was over, it still drew its thousands every month, and Greeley's famous advice to the young man was followed without having been asked. Lola became infected with the fever. There was much of the gambler in her nature, and her zest for adventure was keener than of old. At this time, too, a positive distaste for civilisation appears to have possessed her. It may have been the vision of a wild, unfettered life in a virgin land that dispelled the sickly hankerings for the cloister. She sailed across the Gulf of Mexico to San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, as it is now called, the newly opened halfway-house to the gold-fields. Thence the route lay across the beautiful savannahs of Nicaragua to the Pacific shore. She passed the white-walled towns of Leon and Rivas, which Walker and his filibusters two years later harried with fire and sword. This was an alternative route to that across the isthmus of Panama, which she was fabled to have followed in a book by Russell, the war-correspondent, called the "Adventures of Mrs. Seacole." Lola refers to this mendacious romance in her little autobiography, and quotes the following passage in order to characterise it at the finish as a base fabrication from beginning to end:--