in hiding until hunger and thirst drove him from his retreat, and he was led from his ruined house to the barrack guardroom through a populace that thirsted for his life. The wretched fugitive, ill with fear and fatigue, was placed between two mounted guards, and the journey was made at a sharp trot, but he could not out-distance the vengeance of the crowd, and his guards could not protect him. Fierce blows were rained upon him by the infuriated multitude, and the man who had been master of Spain, bleeding from a score of wounds and gasping for breath, was only rescued from instant death by a miracle. The mob still overran the streets of Aranjuez, and swarmed around the royal palace in which Charles IV. signed the decree handing the crown of Spain to Ferdinand. A few days later he withdrew his abdication privately at the instigation of General Monthion, Murat’s chief of the staff, and shortly afterwards left Aranjuez for the Escorial, from whence, on the 25th April following, he set out for Bayonne, to lay the crown at the feet of the Emperor of the French. The king died at Rome in 1819; Ferdinand, having spent six years at Valençay, where he was virtually a prisoner of the French, was restored to the throne of Spain. During the nineteen years of his reign Ferdinand VII. and the coarse, ignorant vulgarians who composed the camarilla by which he surrounded himself, spent much of their time at Aranjuez. Here the vast conspiracy was hatched against the Constitution, which led to the battle between the militia and the citizens in 1822; and here the worthless monarch intrigued until his death to re-establish absolutism, and restore the old rotten order of things which the nation had shed its best blood to wipe out.