After his appreciating
audience had exhausted their musical repertory and had as many
encores as they thought good, they broke up the concert and betook
themselves to their fastnesses among the mountains, leaving their
patient to find his way to the coast as best he might, with a pocket
as light as his soul was heavy. At Vera Cruz a concert or two
furnished him with the means of embarking himself and his troupe for
Europe, and leaving the New World forever behind him.
And here I must leave him, for my story is done. The reader hungering
for a moral may discern, that, though Signor G---- received the
price he asked for his lovely daughter, it advantaged him nothing,
and that he not only lost it all, but it was the occasion of his
losing everything else he had. This is very well as far as it goes;
but then it is equally true that M. M. ---- actually obtained his
wife, and that Mynheer Van Holland paid for her. I dare say all this
can be reconciled with the eternal fitness of things; but I protest
I don't see how it is to be done. It is "all a muddle," in my mind.
I cannot even affirm that the banditti were ever hanged; and I am
quite sure that the unlucky Dutch merchant, whose goods were so
comically mixed up with this whole history, never had any poetical
or material justice for his loss of them.
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