Certain it is that on the night of October 4, 1910, while the King was at Lisbon for the purpose of receiving with due honor the new President of Brazil, Marshal Hermes de Fonseca, then visiting Portugal, the Republican conspirators decided to anticipate the stroke of revolt by imprisoning the King and preventing him from flying to the Northern provinces. The Vice-Admiral, Candido Reis, awaited with his squadron in the Bay of Lisbon, and gave the signal to turn the fire of the cannon upon the Royal Palace. On land the Sixteenth Regiment of infantry killed the royal officials, joined with the revolutionary mob, took possession of the Arsenal in order to arm the rebels, and launched the war against their sovereign and the throne. Manuel, taken unawares, found himself practically alone. While his uncle, the Duke of Porto, attempted a desperate defence by placing himself at the head of the mountain artillery, and was constrained to retreat, the young King, abandoned by his councillors and his courtiers, the friends of his brief day of power, determined to shed no unnecessary blood and took refuge in exile. [Illustration: SOLDIERS ARRESTING RELIGIOUS.] There was indeed a moment when the tide of revolution seemed forced back towards failure, and in that moment Candido Reis, the principal instigator of the revolution, committed suicide. The news only aroused the mob to increased fury, and sent them burning with anti-clerical hatred against the helpless religious. The horrors and the excesses of that oppression have been demonstrated by the numberless murders and by the horrible cruelties practised upon the defenceless victims of "Liberty." It is probable that the complete story of the persecution inflicted upon the religious of Portugal will never be known. Some of the victims have disappeared as completely as if the earth had swallowed them. But the history of the survivors is full enough in its appalling details to give an idea of the utter barbarity of the oppressors and the ignorance which impelled them to action. Against the Jesuits the Portuguese secret societies have entertained an abiding hatred ever since the days of the infamous Pombal. Long before the late Revolution the writer visited the ancient church of the Jesuits in Ponte Delgado in the Azores Islands, and there beheld the evidences of vandalism perpetrated years before upon altars and shrines that have not their equal in the world. Naturally the fury of the mob, in the recent upheaval, sought out these Fathers as a worthy object of brutality, and inflicted upon them indignities with a savagery worthy of the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands.