Antonio examined the countenance of each, but he did not recognise any one till he came to a man lying bound on the ground, his clothes torn and bloody, with two of the guards standing near him, badly wounded. "Ah!" he exclaimed, "Senhor Rodrigo, you know me, I think?" "Yes," answered the ruffian; "I am not likely to forget you." Luis looked on with anxiety, for he beheld the ruffian who had carried off Clara; but Antonio, desiring to be left alone with the man, knelt down by his side, while Captain Pinto detailed to Luis the circumstances of his capture. His last act had been in character with his former life. The guards were passing a house from which loud cries were heard to proceed, and on entering it an old man was found weltering in his blood on the floor, and a woman was struggling in the grasp of the ruffian, whose shrieks prevented his hearing their entrance. Before they could seize him, however, he had plunged his knife into her bosom; and then turning on them, had wounded two in his attempt to escape; but at last, after a desperate resistance, he was captured. Luis shuddered as he heard the account. "Has my beloved Clara been in the power of a wretch like this?" he thought. Antonio held some minutes' conversation with the bravo. "For what purpose did you carry off the lady?" he said, after some time. "To serve another, the greater my folly," was the answer. "And she is there still?" inquired Antonio. "Yes, if he has not removed her.--Go, I would have my revenge on him. He has deceived me twice, and you may gain the ransom I expected--and then I shall die happy." Before night the corpse of the noted bravo, Rodrigo, was seen hanging from the highest gibbet at the gates of Lisbon. Volume 2, Chapter XVI. We have observed, in the course of our very desultory custom of reading, that most novelists delight in endeavouring to make their readers suppose, somewhere about the middle of their second volume, that their hero, or heroine, in whose fate by that time they may have begun to feel some interest, has been engulfed beneath the raging waves, or dashed to pieces from falling off a lofty, sea-worn cliff, or murdered by banditti in a forest, or blown up in a castle, or has made his or her exit from this terrestrial scene in some equally romantic way; for we cannot fill our page with further instances. Now, we confess that, after a little experience, we were never deceived by such ingenious devices. In the first place, very few writers have the hardihood to kill their heroes or heroines at all, for the reason, that few readers approve of the principle; and, in the second, they would not think of doing so till the end of the third volume, as they would find considerable difficulty in continuing their story without them. For our own part, rather than commit so atrocious an act, we would alter the truth of history, and defer the dreadful catastrophe to the final scene.