Few fortresses, even in the Old World, were more powerful or complete. It enclosed armories, magazines, workshops, and cells; cells in rows, all of which were duly numbered when Montevideo was completed in the eighteenth century. And, to give it the last and happiest touch, the picture of Ferdinand VII., King of Spain, Lord of the Indies and the New World, was painted over the doorway of every cell, and they were many. Nor is this the full tale of Montevideo. On the inner side of each angle, broad wooden stairways ascended to the top, the stairways themselves being enclosed at intervals by wooden gates twelve feet high. The real fortifications enclosed a square of nearly five hundred feet, and inside this square were the buildings of the officers and the barracks of the soldiers. The floor of the square was paved with thick cement, and deep down under the cement were immense water tanks, holding millions of gallons, fed by subterranean springs of pure cold water. By means of underground tunnels the moats could be flooded with water from the tanks or springs. It has been said that the Spaniards are massive builders, the most massive since the Romans, and they have left their mark with many a huge stone structure in the southern part of the New World. What Montevideo cost the kings of Spain no one has ever known, and, although they probably paid twice for every stick and stone in it, Peru and Mexico were still pouring forth their floods of treasure, and there was the fortress, honey colored, lofty, undeniably majestic and powerful. When Mexico displaced Spain, she added to the defenses of Montevideo, and now, on this spring day in 1847, it lowered, dark and sinister, over the road. It was occupied by a strong garrison under that alert and valiant soldier, Captain Pedro de Armijo, raised recently to that rank, but still stinging with the memories of Buena Vista, he was anxious that the Americans should come and attack him in Montevideo. He stood on the rampart at a point where it was seventy feet wide, and he looked with pride and satisfaction at the row of eighty guns. Pedro de Armijo, swelling with pride, felt that he could hold the castle of Montevideo against twenty thousand men. Time had made no impression upon those massive walls, and the moat was filled with water. The castle, mediæval, but grim and formidable, sat in its narrow mountain valley with the Cofre de Montevideo (Trunk of Montevideo) behind it on the north. This peak was frequently covered with snow and at all times was gloomy and forbidding. Even on bright days the sun reached it for only a few hours.