The latest news we hear of the Carlist priest is that a woman was shot by his orders at Escoriaza.[A] On second thought I am not so sure that I should very much like to meet Santa Cruz. And at this very period, while the shrieks of a fusilladed female were ringing in the air, a fussy committee of dilettante Carlists, sitting in London, protested that the sacred cause of legitimacy was advancing by lawful, chivalric, and immaculate means only! From the snug security of their back-parlour they wrote letters to the papers denying the "wanton" destruction of railway-stations by the Carlists. The flames were still undulating over the station of Santa Olla, between Burgos and Pancorbo, while the ink was wet on that inspired refutation! There are factories of falsehood elsewhere than in Spain. A cabecilla had warned the station-masters in Guipúzcoa that all railway-servants who durst perform their work would be shot, and that all trains which had the hardihood to move would be given over to the flames; and Lizárraga, an ex-field-officer of the regular army, had calmly notified to the alcaldes of the province that he would fine them what would be the equivalent of a hundred pounds sterling with us the first time they failed to advise him of the movements of troops, and that he would stick them up against a wall and put a bullet through their heads for the second offence. Passports through the Carlist lines, formally drawn up, sealed, and signed, were for sale for ten duros (about two pounds sterling) in bureaux transparently dissembled, and met with ready purchasers. The article was cheap, if only as a curiosity. Here is the textual copy of an announcement in _La Esperanza_, a recognised and tolerated Carlist organ of Madrid: "The direction of the Northern Railway Company having failed to observe the neutrality ordered respecting the conveyance of troops and stores of war, the Carlists, we are assured, cut the line yesterday at four points in the province of Guipúzcoa." The Republic that permitted a newspaper published under its nose thus to talk of rebels against its authority "ordering" the railway companies not to convey troops was not arbitrary, to my thinking. But Spain is an enigma. An English Government would hardly permit a journal to speak of the operations of a Fenian band in the same terms. There could be no concealment of the fact that the adherents of Charles VII., king _in nubibus_, were making headway. On the 9th of March a combat was fought at Monreal, a village on the slope of a hill to the south-east of Pampeluna, between the factions of Dorregaray, Ollo, Perula, and others, and the regulars under Nouvilas, the General who had set out from the capital with such a grandiloquent farewell speech. Pampeluna is distant sixteen hours by rail. The account of the combat, the most important since Oroquieta, was published in the official journal four days afterwards.