“You all know, lads, that when the storming of the town was over, we took the duty there. Well, in the house where I was quartered, there lived nobody but an old couple: the man had been a smuggler, and had once been a prisoner of war in England, so that he managed by his intercourse with British and Americans, to speak English pretty tolerably. The old woman was a regular Basquentian mountaineer, with scarcely a bit of flesh on her bones, and not less than eighty years of age. This old couple had returned to St. Sebastian to occupy the house of a leather-seller, who retired from the town before the siege. And the house was certainly in a complete state of dilapidation, with the exception of the ground-floor; it had been on fire during the siege, and although the flames had not made much havoc in it, yet the shot and shell had done enough to reduce it to a complete wreck. Here I used to sit with the old pair of a night, talking of various subjects, and it was from the old man I heard the particulars of the ‘_Friar and the Lady_.’ He told me that his wife lived in the capacity of waiting-maid with the heroine of the tale, and that the convent of St. Benedict, to which the friar belonged, was in the same street where we then resided. The convent in which the young lady lived was at the extremity of the town, near the sea, which the back windows looked out upon, from an elevated rock. You have all seen the rock, yourselves. “The young lady was about seventeen years of age; she had been admitted as a novice in the convent of Santa Clara, and was to be made a nun in about ten or twelve months after the period of her becoming acquainted with the friar. He was on very familiar terms with the mother abbess, as well as the whole of the establishment; for he was universally celebrated for piety and wisdom: his age was about thirty-five. This _holy_ gentleman managed matters so that he got the better of the novice's virtue, and the consequences were that she became pregnant: they contrived to conceal all appearances of her frailty; and the holy father, in order to preserve his reputation, prevailed upon the novice to elope with him, under a promise of removing her to Italy, whither he proposed to follow her, and to settle in that country. The night was fixed for carrying this plan into effect,—this was about a week before the day on which she was to take the veil—the friar procured a boat, and with it came to the back of the convent at midnight; the novice was prepared, and bade adieu to the walls of her sisterhood for ever. She entered the boat, and the friar easily rowed it along the coast towards the port of Passages, for it was a fine moonlight night, and the sea was as bright as a looking-glass. Before they had proceeded many yards from the beach the young lady became ill, and in half an hour was delivered of a fine boy in the boat: there were no clothes for the little stranger, and the friar was determined it should not long