250 JOURNAL. 
it4 
ee 
66 
ce 
6s 
6 
66 
66 
a 
n 
account, who had a very dangerous fever. On the very day of the 
crisis of her illness, an officer from the senate arrived, demanding 
our eldest daughter. My husband went to the Director, represent- 
ing the wretched state of the family, and especially the delicate 
state of my Ana Maria. But he was told that it was an affair of 
state, and she must appear; so I left Mariquita with her sisters, 
and set off with the officer to fetch my daughter. 
“ We brought her to town; she was taken before the senate, and 
there the letter written by Jose Miguel was shown her *, and she 
was desired to read it. She answered, that she did not know the 
cipher, and therefore could not. One of the court reminded her, 
that she had often used a cipher in her letters to her husband while 
he was imprisoned at Mendoza. She who, till then, had not heard 
her husband’s name without convulsions, now seemed inspired with 
courage from above. ‘ Yes,’ she said, ‘ we did occasionally write a 
line in cipher. Could we expose our intimate concerns to the 
strangers who, we knew, read our letters ere they reached us? Or 
could we bear the coarse laugh of the guard-room, where they were 
read, at the effusions of our tenderness ? But when ye took from 
me the letters and papers of my martyred husband, ye took from 
me also the key of that cipher, and I know no other.’ One of the 
senators, looking sternly at the beautiful girl, said, —‘ Does Dojia 
Ana Maria choose to have the words martyred husband inserted into 
the minutes of her examination ?? She answered, ‘I have said, and 
I do say, martyred husband. The examiners then told her, that 
unless she read the letters in question to the council there assembled, 
she should be shut up in aconvent. Her reply still was —‘ I cannot, 
I know not the cipher. And if the letter were addressed to me, of 
which you have no proof, does another person’s act in addressing 
me make me acriminal ? There are, alas! other women, and other 
widows of my name and family, to whom it might well have been 
* This letter was really written to her, and treated not of schemes and purposes, so 
much as hopes, for the subversion of the actual government. It was highly imprudent — 
perhaps worse. 
