"Where shall you conduct me?" "To Cabildo." "To Cabildo! What for?" "The governor gives a grand ball there today; we shall spend some little time there." "I fear that this conceals some political manoeuvre." "Perhaps." "Provided that I do not find myself further mixed up in it, spite of myself--" "I will try to leave you ignorant of what may transpire." "I shall be very grateful to you for it. Well, à la grâce de Dieu!" The three men, quite reconciled, left the little inclosure, set out from Alameda, and took the road to Cabildo, conversing in a friendly way. The streets were illuminated, and the population were diverting themselves more than ever in letting off fireworks. CHAPTER XIX. LA MONTONERA. Montonero, the feminine of which is montonera, is essentially an American word, although its root is undoubtedly Spanish. It signifies, literally, a heap, a mass, a collection. Taken in the bad acceptation of the word, a montonera means a gathering of men of the sack and cord--of bandits without faith or law--of highway robbers. But this is not the meaning which was at first given to the word. They understood by montonera, a cuadrilla--a guerilla composed of banished politicians--of insurgents who made war as partisans at their own risk and peril, but who were brave and honest. The Spaniards, at the commencement of the insurrection of the colonies against the government, imposed this name on them in order to lower them in public opinion--a name in which the Montoneros themselves boasted, and which they considered it an honour to bear. But when the civil war degenerated into a fratricidal struggle among citizens--when the Spaniards were conquered and constrained to abandon the new world--the Montoneros degenerated, and suspicious men of all parties came to shelter themselves under their banners, and to seek there an impunity for their crimes. They were then nothing more than a lot of sinister bandits, resembling those bands of robbers and vagrants of the middle ages which so long desolated Europe, and the successive governments were, during more than two centuries, powerless to destroy, or even to repress them. Appearing to have received the traditions of their progenitors of the old World, the Montoneros commenced to ravage the country, to pillage the haciendas, to put to ransom the towns too weak to oppose an energetic resistance to them; and serving any cause for pay, they adopted all parties in turn, remorselessly betraying one after the other, and only seeing in civil war one end--pillage.