"Meanwhile, my grandfather had triced up his portlids, and a gang with buckets and swabs were busy cleaning, airing, and fumigating every place fore and aft, ere the live cargo were shipped again at night, when an unforeseen catastrophe took place----"
"A catastrophe!" said I; "the ship was blown out to sea?"
"Not at all," said Hartly, refilling his pipe.
"His poor people were all dead ere nightfall."
"Aye, in cold blood, as you shall hear. They were all enjoying themselves--the children were playing, gambolling and tumbling over each other in heaps on the warm sands; the women were busy washing, dressing and arranging each other's hair; the men smoking their pipes, and talking, perhaps regretfully, of that jolly old England they had left for ever and, it might be hopefully, of the new shores they were bound for, when a long line of bright bayonets that glittered ominously in the sunshine, appeared suddenly upon the steep rocks which completely enclosed the sandy cove, and three companies of lubberly Spanish militia commanded by Don Juan Briez de Calderon, encircled them on all sides, save towards the sea, where the _Dublin_ lay at anchor about three-quarters of a mile off. The reason of this military display I shall explain.
"False rumours of a plague said to be raging in Europe had reached these isles, and filled the selfish and superstitious Spanish colonists with such alarm, that Señor the Governor, fearing, or pretending to fear, the strangers might bring it among them, instantly convened la Mesa del Consejo--his council-board, as they call it in their lingo--and quietly proposed to cut off all these voyagers root and branch!
"Some of the councillors vigorously opposed a course so revolting, and pled the cause of the poor Inglesos, the rights of religion and humanity, and called upon Don Juan to remember the honour of the king he represented, and that he was the lineal descendant of that adventurous Don Diego de Hierro, of Old Castile, who had captured the island in the days of Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Arragon, bestowing in memory thereof his own illustrious name upon it, and so forth.
"Señor Don Juan did not reply, but knit his fierce black brows, lighted a cigar, and puffed away with true Castilian imperturbability.