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But in all that terrible time this was the only event that seemed to touch or rouse her; for the rest, one might have thought those dreadful days but the ordinary calendar of Herlinda’s life. Indeed, it is to be supposed that they suited so well the desolation of her spirit, and that they presented so congruous a setting to her melancholy, that it became merged and absorbed as it were in her surroundings, and so was unperceived, save as the fitting humor of a time when ease and mirth would have been an insult to the general woe.

Doña Isabel had announced her intention of replacing the director of the reduction-works; but time went on, and in the general consternation produced by the epidemic nothing was done. There was much sickness at the works; many of the most experienced hands died; and one day when the clerk in charge was at the crisis of the fever, the men who were not incapacitated from illness went by common consent to the tienda to stupefy themselves with fiery native brandy; and Doña Isabel, who was fearlessly passing from one poor hovel to another, aiding the village doctress and the priest in their offices, ordered the mules to be taken from the tortas, and the stamps to be stopped. Thus, as the masses half mixed lay upon the floors, they gradually dried and hardened; and as the great stone wheels ceased to turn in the beds of broken ores, so for years upon years they remained, and the works at Tres Hermanos gradually fell into ruin,—a fit haunt for the ghost which, as years went by, was said to haunt their shades. But this was long afterward, when the memory of the handsome and hapless youth had become almost as a myth, mingled with the thousand tales of blood which the fluctuating fortunes of years of international and civil war made as common as they were terrible.