"To our friends the English!" shouted all the company, rising to their feet, and the toast being duly honoured they left their places and began conversing in groups about the room, upon which Don Gregorio ordered a large pair of folding doors to be thrown open, and invited his guests to adjourn to the sala for coffee, thus preventing the perpetration of any more ambiguous speeches. From the sala the guests gradually dispersed, many of them being engaged to pass the rest of the night at the house of Don Fausto Velasquez. "My congratulations on your speech, my friend," said Marcelino to Gordon, as they left the house together. "Some of them did not half like it," replied Gordon, laughing; "but I said nothing that I have not said to you fifty times." "True, but it would be treason for any of us to speak so before the Viceroy. The Spanish doctrine is that 'a colony is a slave.'" "If her colonists were slaves Spain would have lost this colony a year ago. It takes men to beat us." "Well, as my father said, we will never beat you again. I never drank to a toast with more pleasure in my life than I did to his 'To our friends the English!'" BOOK IV THE DAWN OF FREEDOM PART I THE BRIGHTENING OF THE EASTERN SKY PROLOGUE The thoughts of a youth are as the winds of heaven, which blow where they list, none knowing whence they come or whither they go, yet have they all some certain course and goal. The thoughts of a youth spring from the instincts of his nature, and are turned hither and thither by the ever-varying circumstances which surround him, yet all tend to one end--the development of his strength and character. The youth has but one object before him, to be a man; if he live, the attainment of this object is certain, its value is to him incalculable; manhood is to the youth the gate which opens to him the whole world. The veil had fallen from before the unknown future, Buenos Aires stood face to face with her destiny. Her chains had been struck from her hands and from her feet, by events of which she could have no foreknowledge; she stood upright in her youthful strength, unfettered, and alone. But Buenos Aires had looked upon Spain as upon a mother; now that Spain lay prostrate in her degradation she felt her tyranny no longer, she remembered only that she was her mother. The waves of the sea toss up their heads rushing to and fro, dashing themselves in never-ending succession upon the shingly beach, each wave after its headlong rush sinking back again into the ocean, vanishing for ever, yet does the tide ever march steadily onwards. As are the waves of ocean, so are the thoughts of a youth, vacillating ever, yet ever advancing towards the one inevitable goal. As are the thoughts of a youth, so are the acts of a young nation, which is not yet known to be a nation, vacillating ever, yet ever advancing towards that one goal which is the object of all her aspirations--Independence. CHAPTER I MAGDALEN