say that the secret is still hidden. Yet, because I have promised, and because you will be angry if I do not, let me do my best.

After ten years of restlessness in Spain, with thoughts always turning back to the dreadful Andes, Kate heard of an expedition on the point of sailing to Spanish America.1 All soldiers knew her, so that she had information of everything which stirred in camps. Men of the highest military rank were going out with the expedition; but Kate was a sister everywhere privileged; she was as much cherished and as sacred, in the eyes of every brigade or tertia, as their own regimental colours; and every member of the staff, from the highest to the lowest, rejoiced to hear that she would join their mess on board ship. This ship, with others, sailed; whither finally bound, I really forget. But, on reaching America, all the expedition touched at Vera Cruz.2 Thither a great crowd of the military went on shore. The leading officers made a separate party for the same purpose. Their intention was to have a gay, happy dinner, after their long confinement to a ship, at the chief hotel; and happy in perfection the dinner could not be unless Kate would consent to join it. She, that was ever kind to brother soldiers, agreed to do so. She descended into the boat along with them, and in twenty minutes the boat touched the shore. All the bevy of gay laughing officers, junior and senior, like so many schoolboys let loose from school, jumped on shore, and walked hastily, as their time was limited, up to the hotel. Arriving there, all turned round in eagerness, saying, "Where is our dear Kate?" Ah, yes, my dear Kate, at that solemn moment, where, indeed, were you? She had,

1 This brings us to the year 1635, when Kate, after her ten years or so of attempted rest and quasi-respectability in Spain or elsewhere in Europe, had attained the forty-third year of her age.-M.

2 If De Quincey had not been here huddling up the conclusion of his story for Tait's Magazine on pressure from the printers, he would certainly have explained that Vera Cruz is not on that western or Pacific shore of South America with which Kate had already been familiar by her previous adventures, nor in any part of South America at all, but is on the East or Atlantic side of Spanish North America, -being, in fact, the chief port of Mexico, and situated far within the Gulf of Mexico, about 190 miles from the inland city of Mexico itself. -M.

beyond all doubt, taken her seat in the boat: that was certain, though nobody, in the general confusion, was certain of having seen her actually step ashore. The sea was searched for her the forests were ransacked. But the sea did not give up its dead, if there indeed she lay; and the forests made no answer to the sorrowing hearts which sought her amongst them. Have I never formed a conjecture of my own upon the mysterious fate which thus suddenly enveloped her, and hid her in darkness for ever? Yes, I have. But it is

a conjecture too dim and unsteady to be worth repeating. Her brother soldiers, that should naturally have had more materials for guessing than myself, were all lost in sorrowing perplexity, and could never arrive even at a plausible conjecture.1

That happened two hundred and twenty-one years ago! And here is the brief upshot of all:-This nun sailed from Spain to Peru, and she found no rest for the sole of her foot. This nun sailed back from Peru to Spain, and she found no rest for the agitations of her heart. This nun sailed again from Spain to America, and she found the rest which all of us find. But where it was could never be made known to the father of Spanish camps, that sat in Madrid, nor to Kate's spiritual father, that sat in Rome. Known it is to the great Father of All, that once whispered to Kate on the Andes; but else it has been a secret for more than two centuries; and to man it remains a secret for ever and ever!

1 See Appended Editorial Note.-M.

AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT IN 1854

THERE are some narratives which, though pure fictions from first to last, counterfeit so vividly the air of grave realities that, if deliberately offered for such, they would for a time impose upon everybody. In the opposite scale there are other narratives, which, whilst rigorously true, move amongst characters and scenes so. remote from our ordinary experience, and through a state of society so favourable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they would everywhere pass for romances, if severed from the documents which attest their fidelity to facts. In the former class stand the admirable novels of Defoe, and, on a lower range within the same category, the inimitable Vicar of Wakefield; upon which last novel, without at all designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive experiment :—I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl of seventeen, the daughter of a 'statesman in Westmorland, not designing any deception (nor so much as any concealinent) with respect to the fictitious character of the incidents and of the actors in that famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the exquisite verisimilitude of the work, meeting with such absolute inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them. This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and, when next I saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I had forgotten it. Consequently, at first I was perplexed by the unfaltering gravity with which my fair young friend

spoke of Dr. Primrose, of Sophia and her sister, of Squire Thornhill, etc., as real and probably living personages, who could sue and be sued. It appeared that this artless young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances as a bare possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London swindlers, had read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so thoroughly life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and loving sympathy to the different persons in the tale and the natural distresses in which they are involved, without suspecting for a moment that, by so much as a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment, the pure gospel truth of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened in a kind of breathless stupor to my frank explanation that not part only, but the whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and indignation flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had been hoaxed and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never again, to the end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be reminded of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had practised upon her youthful credulity.

In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer itself for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on the other hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which, in every detail of time and place have since been sifted and authenticated, stood a good chance at one period of being classed as the most lawless of romances. It is, indeed, undeniable—and this arises as a natural result from the bold adventurous character of the heroine, and from the unsettled state of society at that period in Spanish America that a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a romance-writer would have been likely to invent since, if striking, tragic, and even appalling, they are at times repulsive. And it seems evident that, once putting himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction, the writer would

have used his privilege more freely for his own advantage, whereas the author of these memoirs clearly writes under the coercion and restraint of a notorious reality, that would not suffer him to ignore or to modify the leading facts. Then, as to the objection that few people or none have an experience presenting such uniformity of perilous adventure, a little closer attention shows that the experience in this case is not uniform; and so far otherwise that a period of several years in Kate's South American life is confessedly suppressed, and on no other ground whatever than that this long parenthesis is not adventurous, not essentially differing from the monotonous character of ordinary Spanish life.

Suppose the case, therefore, that Kate's Memoirs had been thrown upon the world with no vouchers for their authenticity beyond such internal presumptions as would have occurred to thoughtful readers when reviewing the entire succession of incidents, I am of opinion that the person best qualified by legal experience to judge of evidence would finally have pronounced a favourable award; since it is easy to understand that in a world so vast as the Peru, the Mexico, the Chili, of Spaniards during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and under the slender modification of Indian manners as yet effected by the Papal Christianisation of these countries, and in the neighbourhood of a river-system so awful, of a mountain-system so unheard-of in Europe, there would probably, by blind, unconscious sympathy, grow up a tendency to lawless and gigantesque ideals of adventurous life, under which, united with the duelling code of Europe, many things would become trivial and commonplace experiences that to us home-bred English (“qui musas colimus severiores") seem monstrous and revolting.

Left, therefore, to itself, my belief is that the story of the Military Nun would have prevailed finally against the demurs of the sceptics. However, in the meantime, all such demurs were suddenly and officially silenced for ever. Soon after the publication of Kate's Memoirs, in what you may call an early stage of her literary career, though two centuries after her personal career had closed, a regular controversy arose upon the degree of credit due to these extraordinary confessions (such they may be called) of the poor conscience