The individual who would have been the second to attract the notice of a wayfarer, owed this distinction rather to his personal deformity than to any other very striking characteristic. He was a hunchback, with much of the saturnine and sour expression which distinguishes the countenances of the deformed, and yet of a spirit so much belied by his looks, that he heard, recognized, and constantly replied to, without anger, the nickname of _Corcobado_, or the humpbacked, to which his misfortune exposed him. The most observable peculiarity in his countenance, was the uncommon length of his nose, which so far intruded upon the lower part of his visage, as to give this a look of age, which was contradicted, not only by other features, but by the prodigious muscularity of his shoulders and arms. It must be confessed, however, that his lower extremities were entirely unworthy to compare with the upper, being both so short and thin, that when he stood upon his feet, his arms crossed behind,--which was their ordinary position,--with the stout iron plates protruding from both back and breast, he looked rather like a bundle of armour and garments, exposed to the air and supported above the earth on two broken pikestaves or javelins, than a living and human creature. The next individual was a man of good stature, who would have been considered, notwithstanding his grey hairs, the strongest man in the company, had it not been for his general emaciation and an expression of suffering on a countenance over which disease, contracted among the hot and humid swamps of the coast, had cast the sickliest hues of jaundice. Indeed, this discolouration, on a visage naturally none of the fairest, was of so deep a tint, that it had gained for the invalid, as well as for a whole ship's crew of his companions, the significant title of _Ojo Verde_, or the Green Eye. And here we may as well observe, that, in the army of Cortes, the wit which shows itself in the invention of such distinctions, was so prevalent, that there was scarce a man, from the general down to his groom or scullion, who had not been honoured by at least _one_ sobriquet. The fourth personage was a man of indifferent figure, remarkable for little save the marvellous sweetness of his eyes, which were set among features exceedingly sharp and harsh, and the volubility of his tongue. The fifth sat apart from the others, a little down the slope of the hillock, with tablets in his hands, yet so plunged in abstraction, or so much wrapped up in the contemplation of the dark lake, the little piraguas dancing over its billows, and the far-distant turrets of the infidel city, that he seemed to have forgotten, not only the presence of his companions, and the passing procession, but the purpose for which he had drawn forth his writing implements.