well-known melody that welcomes his approach! gaze once more upon the rolling Pampa! look again upon those flying hills!  Thou who hast said, “There is no life but this life,” who didst “believe in nothing,” shalt know these things no more! five minutes hence thy statecraft will be over, thy long apprenticeship will have expired! thou shalt be standing—­where thou mayst learn the secret that the wisest man of all the bookworms thou despisest will never know alive!

Barranca Yaco is reached.  The warning was well founded.  A crack is heard, —­there is a puff of smoke,—­and two musket-balls pass each other in the carriage, yet without inflicting injury on its occupants.  From either side the road, however, the partida dashes forth.  In a moment the horses are disabled, the postilions, the negro, and the couriers cut down.  Ortiz trembles more violently than ever; Quiroga rises above himself.  Looking from the carriage while the butchery is going on, he addresses the murderers with a few unfaltering words.  There is glamour in his speech; the ensanguined assassins hesitate,—­another instant, only one moment more, and they will be on their knees before him; but Santos Perez, who was at one side, comes up, raises his piece,—­and the body of Juan Fecundo Quiroga falls in a soulless heap with a bullet in the brain!  Ortiz was immediately hacked to pieces; and the tragedy of Cordova is at an end.

Such were the life, misdeeds, and death of the Terror of the Pampas.  Having in the most rapid and imperfect manner sketched the career of this extraordinary Fortune’s-child, his rise from the most abject condition to unbridled power, his ferocious rule, and his almost heroic end, we may surely exclaim, that “nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,” and, presenting this bare resume of facts as a mere outline, a mere pen-and-ink sketch of the terrible chieftain, refer the curious student to the impassioned narrative whence our facts are mainly derived.

It may be well to add, that Santos Perez, who was actively pursued by the government of Buenos Ayres, which itself had instigated him to the commission of the crime, was finally, after many hairbreadth escapes, betrayed by his mistress to the agents of Rosas, and suffered death at Buenos Ayres with savage fortitude.  The Lord have mercy on his soul!

MADEMOISELLE’S CAMPAIGNS.

THE SCENE AND THE ACTORS.

The heroine of our tale is one so famous in history that her proper name never appears in it.  The seeming paradox is the soberest fact.  To us Americans, glory lies in the abundant display of one’s personal appellation in the newspapers.  Our heroine lived in the most gossiping of all ages, herself its greatest gossip; yet her own name, patronymic or baptismal, never was talked about.  It was not that she sank that name beneath high-sounding titles; she only elevated