At the time I paid no attention to the story, knowing how the dramatic instinct of the Spaniard lends itself to exaggeration in repeating anything that appeals to the imagination, and thinking that the whole thing might have been a dream. But later on I found reason to think there might be some basis of fact in what was related by my young fruit-seller. When the _Pais_ article appeared I was told, in the course of a conversation about it, that a priest in a neighbouring town had said in the hearing of my interlocutor--of course unaware that he was listening--that his party were all armed and prepared to shoot “on sight” every one whom they knew to be inimical to them, directly the opportunity offered. And thenceforward for some weeks constant reports of the arming of friars and their lay allies--the “Young Catholics,” “Luises,” and other such associations--were published by the one party and denied by the other with equal frequency. In this connection the following passages from an article in the _Correo Español_ are rather significant. “In Barcelona ten Carlists sufficed to prevent the burning of a church, and put the mob to flight, so that they left in the hands of our friends the weapons they were carrying in pursuit of their vandalic designs” [an incident already referred to]. “And there are 100,000 brave men such as these in Spain.... We are prepared for all! all!! all!!!” (in crescendo capitals). “The fight, which inevitably had to come sooner or later, has now begun between Catholics and sectarians, between civilisation and barbarism, and we must not stop till we have destroyed them.” It all reads like transpontine melodrama, and as such I at first regarded it. But when day after day announcements appeared that new Carlist clubs were being opened in one small town after another, when Señor Llorens returned from his second sojourn with the troops, loaded with plans, sketches, reports, and what not, relating to the campaign and the general condition of the Army there, and openly announced that he had obtained them for Don Jaime, and when, although the people were shouting songs of defiance to the Carlists and their “King,” the militant “Catholic Association of Social Defence” announced that it had increased its working class membership from 31,000 to 200,000, one began to wonder whether the Carlist “army” might be something more than comic opera.[16]