Juan Lerma, or Castillejo--for such we must now call him--yet lay in confinement. His cell was in a quarter of the palace remote from the royal apartments; and without being altogether exposed to the cannon-shots, with which the attack was begun, was yet so nigh the garden-wall as to make its luckless inhabitant an auditor of all the fearful yells and outcries, with which the besieged and assailants contended for possession of the breaches. He was still bound, and some dozen or more dark-browed pagans kept watch at his doors, one of which led into a broad passage, and the other he knew not whither. They were designed rather to protect him from the fury of the warriors, now concentrated in the garden and palace, than to guard against escape, which the wounds he had received in the defence of Guzman, had but ill fitted him to attempt. All that Guatimozin could do to prolong an existence, now almost insufferably wretched, he did; and at the very moment of the assault, while taking measures to effect his own retreat from an empire now utterly demolished, and a post no longer tenable, he gave hasty instructions to the Ottomi, Techeechee, to secure the escape of his friend. It will be presently seen in what manner fortune defeated this plan, as well as all others now devised by the fallen monarch. It was with a listlessness amounting almost to apathy, that Juan listened to the first discharges of the cannon and the roar of hostile voices. Such sounds had been awakened for several days in succession, and each day they were nearer and louder. If they promised him deliverance, they promised little else; for, having reflected upon the eventful enterprise of the causeway, and digested at leisure and in gloom, many of those details which had almost escaped his notice, in the heat and hurry of contention, he saw but little reason to anticipate from his countrymen, any other reception than such as might be vouchsafed to a condemned criminal and avowed renegade. He remembered, that he had been struck down by a Spaniard, while in the very act of giving life to the Captain-General; and he had a vague suspicion, that the blow was struck by the Barba-Roxa. If Gaspar (of whose death he was entirely ignorant), had met him with such vindictive ferocity, what else could be expected from men who had never looked upon him with friendship? Yet fear for himself made the lightest weight in his load of suffering: his thoughts dwelt upon the captive princess, and not less often, though with perhaps less gnawing anxiety, upon his equally captive sister.