n society, where she was tolerated
whenever she appeared in the company of her niece, Paulita Gomez,
a very beautiful and wealthy orphan, to whom she was a kind of
guardian. At a rather advanced age she had married a poor wretch
named Don Tiburcio de Espadana, and at the time we now see her,
carried upon herself fifteen years of wedded life, false frizzes, and a
half-European costume--for her whole ambition had been to Europeanize
herself, with the result that from the ill-omened day of her wedding
she had gradually, thanks to her criminal attempts, succeeded in
so transforming herself that at the present time Quatrefages and
Virchow together could not have told where to classify her among the
known races.

Her husband, who had borne all her impositions with the resignation of
a fakir through so many years of married life, at last on one luckless
day had had his bad half-hour and administered to her a superb whack
with his crutch. The surprise of Madam Job at such an inconsistency
of character made her insensible to the immediate effects, and only
after she had recovered from her astonishment and her husband had
fled did she take notice of the pain, then remaining in bed for
several days, to the great delight of Paulita, who was very fond
of joking and laughing at her aunt. As for her husband, horrified
at the impiety of what appeared to him to be a terrific parricide,
he took to flight, pursued by the matrimonial furies (two curs and a
parrot), with all the speed his lameness permitted, climbed into the
first carriage he encountered, jumped into the first banka he saw on
the river, and, a Philippine Ulysses, began to wander from town to
town, from province to province, from island to island, pursued and
persecuted by his bespectacled Calypso, who bored every one that had
the misfortune to travel in her company. She had received a report of
his being in the province of La Laguna, concealed in one of the towns,
so thither she was bound to seduce him back with her dyed frizzes.

Her fellow travelers had taken measures of defense by keeping up
among themselves a lively conversation on any topic whatsoever. At
that moment the windings and turnings of the river led them to talk
about straightening the channel and, as a matter of course, about the
port works. Ben-Zayb, the journalist with the countenance of a friar,
was disputing with a young friar who in turn had the countenance of an
artilleryman. Both were shouting, gest