At length the trial came; trial! we might with more propriety call it a farce, such being the actual character of an examination before the military commission of Havana, where but one side is heard, and condemnation is sure to follow, as was the case so lately with one of our own countrymen (Mr. Thrasher), and before him the murder by this same tribunal of fifty Americans in cold blood!  Trial, indeed!  Spanish courts do not try people; they condemn them to suffer—­that is their business.

But let us confine ourselves to our own case; and suffice it to say, that Captain Bezan was found guilty, and at once condemned to die.  His offence was rank insubordination, or mutiny, as it was designated in the charge; but in consideration of former services, and his undoubted gallantry and bravery, the sentence read to the effect, as a matter of extraordinary leniency to him, that it should be permitted for him to choose the mode of his own death-that is, between the garote and being shot by his comrades.

“Let me die like a soldier,” replied the young officer, as the question was thus put to him, before the open court, as to the mode of death which he chose.

“You are condemned, then, Lorenzo Bezan,” said the advocate of the court, “to be shot by the first file of your own company, upon the execution field.”

This sentence was received with a murmur of disapprobation from the few spectators in the court, for the condemned was one of the most beloved men in the service.  But the young officer bowed his head calmly to the sentence, though at close observer might have seen a slight quiver of his handsome lips, as he struggled for an instant with a single inward thought.  What that thought was, the reader can easily guess,—­it was the last link that bound him to happiness.

Lorenzo Bezan had no fear of death, and perhaps estimated his life quite as lightly as any other person who made a soldier’s calling his profession; but since his heart had known the tender promptings of love, life had discovered new charms for him; he lived and breathed in a new atmosphere.  Before he had received the kind considerations of the peerless daughter of Don Gonzales, he could have parted the thread of his existence with little regret.  But now, alas! it was very different; life was most sweet to him, because it was so fully imbued with love and hope in the future.

Wild as the idea might have seemed to any one else, the young officer had promised his own heart, that with ordinary success, and provided no extraordinary difficulty should present itself in his path, to win the heart and love of the proud and beautiful Isabella Gonzales.  He had made her character and disposition his constant study, was more familiar, perhaps, with her strong and her weak points than was she herself, and believed that he knew how best to approach her before whom so many, vastly higher than himself, had knelt in vain, and truth to say, fortune seemed to have seconded his hopes.