"I am a Spaniard," retorted the other; "and you are nothing but wretched Creoles; vile, miserable Creoles; y basta!"
The very earth-worm will turn when trodden upon, and this last insult was too much even for Creole endurance. The young men made a furious rush at the alguazil; but he had foreseen the storm and effected a timely retreat.
Hundreds of Creoles of the middle classes, Metises, Zambos, and Spaniards, had assembled in the adjoining apartment, and looked on at the scene without showing any sympathy either with the police or the young Mexicans. The latter gazed for a second or two at each other in perplexity and dismay, and then separating, disappeared through the different doors.
Some extraordinary scenes and incidents grow out of this masquerade, or rather out of the punishment to which the young noblemen who witnessed it are sentenced. But, lest we should exceed our limits, we must reserve further extracts for a second notice of this very remarkable book.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The prose even is, in its music, rude in ordinary folks—or artful, as in Hamlet's admiration of the world.
[2] Spain and Spaniards in 1843. By Captain S. E. Widdrington, R.N., K.T.S., F.R.S., F.G.S. A Journey across the Desert from Ceylon to Marseilles, &c. &c. By Major and Mrs Griffith. 2 vols. Facts in Mesmerism, with Reasons for a Dispassionate Enquiry into it. By the Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend, A.M.
[3] For an account of one of the most notorious of the public exhibitions of mesmeric clairvoyance, we refer the reader, who may feel sufficiently interested in the matter, to the papers of Dr Forbes in the Lancet, New Series, Vol. i. p. 581, and to the counter statement in the Zoist, Vol. ii. No. 7.
[4] P. 316.
[5] Gachupin is an untranslatable word of Mexican origin. The Spaniards asserted it to mean a hero on horseback; the Indians and coloured races, who applied it as a term of contempt and reproach to the Spaniards and their dependent Creoles, understood by it a thief.