from the spoils of his own empire. He preferred independence and a life of hardship in the wilds of the Andes, to luxury and dishonor at Cusco or Yucay. Toledo, therefore, commissioned Don Martin Garcia de Loyola to follow the Inca into the mountains, and to bring him thence by force. Tupac Amaru fled before him at first, but at length desisted, and suffered himself, with all the members of his household, to be conducted in triumph to Cusco.

Little could he anticipate the scene which there awaited him, and the sufferings of which a relentless state policy was to make him the victim. No sooner had he reached Cusco than a special commission was appointed for his trial, and measures were vigorously undertaken to annihilate the royal family of Peru. The Inca was accused of employing his vassals to sally from the mountains and rob the Spaniards; and of conspiring with his relations of the mixed blood, (the mestizos) to rise in a mass, by concert, and massacre all the Europeans. This accusation involved in ruin a numerous body of men of the best Spanish American families in Peru. The conquerors had frequently married the daughters of Peruvian caciques and females of the blood of the Incas, in order to disguise, under more plausible pretexts, the plunder of the lands and vassals of native princes. The fruit of these marriages inherited the rank and pride of their fathers, with the Indian blood of their mothers. All of

these, who were capable of bearing arms, the Viceroy seized and imprisoned, and at first destined to death; but the fear of insurrection induced him to mitigate the sentence, and to banish them, some to various parts of the New World, and some to Spain.

The fate of the Peruvians of the royal family was still more deplorable. All the males, to the number of thirty-eight, including the two sons of Tupac Amaru, were exiled to Lima, and forbidden to quit the city. It is known that the warm and humid atmosphere of Lima, and of the plains, is often destructive to constitutions habituated to the dry and bracing air of the mountains; and in less than two years thirty-five of these youthful exiles, what with grief at the misfortunes of the race, and affliction at their separation from their friends, and what with the deleterious climate of Los Reyes, all sickened and died; and the remaining three did not long survive their fellow sufferers. Thus by cruel murder perished the males of the blood royal of Peru.

Tupac Amaru himself, the head of the family and the acknowledged Emperor, was condemned to be publicly decapitated in the sight of the whole Peruvian nation. When the Inca was notified of his sentence, he strenuously protested against its cruelty and injustice. He urged, that the impossibility of his procuring any benefit by rebellion was conclusive refutation of the charge that he was

guilty of plotting it. How should he imagine that he, with a handful of vassals, could overturn the Spanish power now that it was firmly established, when his father, Manco Capac, had failed to do it with a host of two hundred thousand men of war against two hundred Spaniards? Besides, if he had been contemplating an insurrection, would he have surrendered himself voluntarily to Loyola? He concluded with the strongest asseverations of his innocence; and appealing from Toledo to his master, he demanded to be sent to Spain, to hear his sentence from Philip himself, confiding that he should receive kingly treatment at the hands of a king.

But the Viceroy was immovable. His mind was fully made up that the Inca should die. It is probable that he was actuated by motives of devoted attachment to his country, and fixed determination that the stability of her vast possessions in America should be secured at all hazards. And his elevated character would seem to countenance the idea; for he was confessedly one of the purest and ablest of the Spanish viceroys; and it is impossible to conceive of any thing else of sufficient weight to cause him to persevere against so much public odium, and so many obstacles of various kinds, which op posed his design. He was unwilling even, it would appear, to trust to the mercy of his master, Philip II., a man who was not liable to be deterred from the pursuit of his interest by scruples of the nicest

character. And learning that the principal Spaniards in the country were coming to supplicate him to commute the punishment of death for exile or imprisonment, he surrounded his house with guards, and peremptorily refused admission to the appli

cants.

In the mean time the preparations for the immediate execution of the Inca were actively hastened. A scaffold was erected in the large public square of Cusco, it being the purpose of the Viceroy to intimidate the whole Peruvian people by the most studied degradation of the Representative of the Sun. On the day appointed for the execution, the Inca was led forth on a mule, with his hands pinioned, a halter around his neck, and the crier going before him proclaiming his approaching death, and the imputed cause of it. While moving to the square, the procession was met by a numerous band of Peruvian women, exclaiming with passionate cries and loud lamentations against the conduct of Toledo, and demanding that ti ey might be slaughtered in the company of their prince, rather than to remain alive to be the slaves of his murderer. Never, indeed, upon whatever occasion, was a movement of popular grief communicated through a greater mass of indignant and agonized beings. Entering the square, where the scaffold stood, the eye gazed upon three hundred thousand souls, assembled to witness the last mournful hour of him, who was the object of profound veneration

to all, as the heir of their ancient sovereigns, and the descendant, not of a long line of kings only, but of the very gods themselves whom the nation worshipped. In his death they were to behold, not merely the prostration of the Incas, but the finishing stroke given to the glorious empire of the Sun, and the sceptre of Peru passed into the hands of a foreign race, the despisers of the religion of the land, the usurpers of its dominion, and the tyrannical oppressors of its inhabitants. They seemed invited, as it were, to attest the act of finally setting the seal to their own perpetual servitude. The idea roused them to shouts of vengeance. As the Inca ascended the fatal stage, and stood environed by the priests in their sacerdotal vestments, and near him the hateful executioner, with his drawn sword displayed, their excitement and indignation broke all bounds; and, but for an incident as remarkable as it was timeous, the Peruvians might even then, in the extremity of their just rage, have fallen upon the Spaniards, and crushed them beneath the mere weight of the eager thousands, who seemed ready to rush upon death to rescue their adored Inca. But just when the elements of discord were on the point of being wrought up to fury, the Inca raised his right hand till the open palm was on a line with his right ear, and then slowly depressed it down to his right thigh. At this familiar signal of silence, instantly, as if the angel of destruction had swept over the assembled crowds, the noisy