When we had finished carrying out the flour, I went and looked for Augustine; but I could find him nowhere, neither in his father's house, nor at the headquarters of supplies, nor in the Coso, nor in Santa Engracia. At nightfall I found him in the powder mill near San Juan de los Panetes. I have forgotten to say that the Saragossans had improvised a work shop where were turned out daily nine or ten quintals of powder. I saw Augustine helping the workmen put into sacks and barrels the powder made during the day. He was working with feverish activity. "Do you see this enormous heap of powder?" he said to me when I approached him. "Do you see those sacks and those barrels all full of the same material? Well, Gabriel, it seems to me very little." "I don't know what you are trying to say." "I say that if this immense quantity of powder were as big as Saragossa I should like it still better. Yes, and in such a case I should I drew him away from the place, taking him to the walls; and we went to work on the fortifications which were being made in Las Tenerias, the weakest point in the city since the destruction of San JosÉ and Santa Engracia. I have already said that from the mouth of the Huerva to San JosÉ stretched a line of fifty mouths of fire. Against this formidable line of attack what avail was our fortified circuit? The quarter of Las Tenerias extended from the eastern part of the city, between the Huerva and the old part of the town, perfectly outlined yet by the wide road which is called the Coso. It was at the beginning of this century a village of mean houses, almost all inhabited by laborers and artisans, and the religious houses there had none of the splendor of the monuments of Saragossa. The general plan of this district is approximately the segment of a circle From that line to the circumference ran several streets, some of them broken, like the Calles de la Diezma, Barrio Verde, de los Clavos, and de Pabostre. Some of these were marked not by rows of houses, but by walls, and lacking sometimes one thing and sometimes another. The streets spread out into formless little squares or yards or barren gardens. I describe badly because in the days I refer to the heaps of ruins left by the first siege had been used to mount batteries and raise barricades in points where the houses did not offer a natural defence. Near the fortification of the Ebro were some remnants of an ancient wall, with various little towers of masonry which some persons supposed to be from the hands of the Romans, and others judged to be the work of the Moors. In my time—I do not know how it may be now—these pieces of wall seemed to be mortised into the houses, or rather the houses were mortised into them, appearing like props and corners of that ancient work, blackened but not crumbled by the passing of so many centuries. The new had been built in a con The general aspect of the district of Las Tenerias brought to the imagination pleasant fancies of all that had taken place during Moorish rule, the abundance of brick, the long gable ends, the irregular fronts, the window lattices with shutters, the complete architectural anarchy, making it impossible to know where one house ended and another began, or of distinguishing whether this had two floors or three, or if that roof served to support the walls of that one over there. The streets at best ended in yards with no ways out. The archways, which gave entrance to a little square, reminded me that here was a vista upon another Spanish people, very different from those now here. This amalgamation of houses which I have described to you, this suburb built up by many generations of laborers and peasants and tanners, according to the caprice of each, without order or harmony, had prepared itself for the defence on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth days of January, at the time when the French began to display their pomp If any one of these pieces were turned upon one of the neighboring roofs, the roof or the entire house, whatever was there, would be immediately blown to pieces. Many passages had been obstructed, and two of the religious edifices of the suburb, San Augustine and Las Monicas, were veritable fortresses. The wall had been rebuilt and strengthened; the batteries had been joined together, and our engineers had calculated the positions and the reach of the enemy's guns very well, in order to accommodate our defences to them. Our line had two advanced points, the mill of Goicoechea and a house which, because it belonged to a certain Don Victoriano Gonzalez, has gone into history by the name of the Casa |