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I showed my Foreign Office passport, with the visa of the Spanish Consulate at London upon it. He gave a cursory look at it, bowed, and returned it to me. Then came the turn of Barbarossa, and there was a flash of shrewd spitefulness in his eyes. "Your papers, señor?" "I have none. I didn't think any were required." "Ah! doubtless you thought Irun was in Carlist occupation. You are wrong."

An English gentleman, who visited the ground while the corpses were still upon it, assured me that the sight was horrifying, and, such was the panic in Irun, that he verily believed Santa Cruz might have taken the town the same afternoon, had he appeared before it with four men. To pursue the story of the redoubtable Cura.

I found it fine work to rumble through the narrow single street of Irun and Renteria, between the strange-colored houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies, and the heraldic doorways. San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is set down in the guidebooks as the Biarritz or the Brighton of Spain.

Crossing the Pyrenees to view the works in the Peninsula, which Bradshaw may possibly have to register in 1862, we find that, amid the financial difficulties of Spain, three lines of railway have been marked out from Madrid to Irun; from Aranjuez to Almansa; and from Alar to Santander.

He warned me to keep a civil tongue in my head; but I knew my man, and within half-an-hour I rode out of his camp with two of his choicest ruffians, one beside me and one ahead to guide me through the darkness. Now at Vittoria the road towards Irun and the frontier runs almost due north for some distance and then bends about in a rough arc towards the east.

That whirlwind ride from Renteria to Irun would come before me as the storm battalions mustered outside, and the waves began lashing themselves into violence of temper. What if I had to go to Madrid while such weather as this was brooding? To get to the capital one is obliged to embark at Bayonne for Santander, and proceed thence by rail so long as no Carlist partidas meddle with the track.

Baffled in this, they bade Gresley, the messenger, to return with them as far as Irun, as they wished him to bear to the king a letter written on Spanish soil. No great distance farther brought them to the small river Bidassoa, the Rubicon of their journey. It formed the boundary between France and Spain.

Carlist sympathizers endeavoured to procure me a conveyance to Irun, but nobody cared to affront the loss of horses, for Belcha's band requisitioned the cattle even of those identical in political feeling the good of the cause was their plea so at last I was forced to say I should be glad of a trap to Los Pasages, a few miles off, whence I might be able to go forward on foot.

He could sit at a green table in an ill-ventilated atmosphere the night long, but he could not walk three miles at a stretch. To effect a crossing by the railway bridge from Hendaye to Irun was out of the question; it was barrier impenetrable. The Frenchman would not allow you to pass in your own interest; the Spaniard declined to admit you in his so-considered interest.

"But before we ride on let us see who the fellows are, for, 'pon my soul, they have not the looks of a patrol from Caracas." As he spoke, Carmen dismounted and closely examined the prostrate men's facings. "Caramba! They belong to the regiment of Irun." "I remember them. They were in Murillo's corp d'armée at Vittoria." "I wish they were at Vittoria now. Their headquarters are at La Victoria!