After a short time they took us to the Calle de Pabostre, and as the battle of the outside and inside of the buildings and of the public way was now all combined, we entered the first block by the Calle de los Viejos. From the windows of the house in which we found ourselves, we could see nothing but smoke, and could tell but little of what was going on there. I saw later that the street was all filled with embrasures and trenches at certain distances made of heaps of earth, furniture, and rubbish. From the windows a tremendous fire was poured forth, and, remembering a phrase of the beggar Sursum Corda, I can say that our souls were turned into bullets. Inside the houses the blood flowed in torrents. The onset of the French was terrible, and that the resistance might not be less terrible the belfries summoned men unceasingly. The general dictated stern orders for the punishment of stragglers. The friars rallied the people of other districts, dragging them forward as in a leash. Some heroic women set an example, throwing themselves into danger, guns in hand. A dreadful day, whose frightful roar resounds ever in the ears of him who was present! Its remembrance pursues him, an unescaped nightmare, through his whole life. He who did not see these horrors, who did not hear the noise of that shouting, knows not with what expression the depths of the horrible may be uttered to human feeling. Do not tell me that you have seen the crater of a volcano in the most violent eruption; or a great tempest in the open ocean when the ship, tossed to heaven on a mountain of waterfalls, descends next to a giddy depth,--do not tell me you have seen these things, for they are nothing at all like the volcanoes and tempests of man when his passions urge him to out-rival the disorders in Nature. It was difficult to hold us back, and not being able to do much where we were, we descended to the street without noticing the officers who tried to hold us back. The combat had an irresistible attraction for us, and called us as the deep calls unto a man who looks down upon it from a cliff. I have never considered myself heroic; but it is certain that in those moments I did not fear death, nor did the sight of catastrophes terrify me. It is true that heroism, as a thing of the moment, and the direct child of inspiration, does not belong exclusively to the brave. That is the reason it is often found in women and cowards.