cry
out, "Thief, thief!" and rush toward the azotea. "A revolver!" cried
one of them. "A revolver, quick! After the thief!"

But the figure, more agile than they, had already mounted the
balustrade and before a light could be brought, precipitated itself
into the river, striking the water with a loud splash.

CHAPTER XXXVI

BEN-ZAYB'S AFFLICTIONS

Immediately upon hearing of the incident, after lights had been brought
and the scarcely dignified attitudes of the startled gods revealed,
Ben-Zayb, filled with holy indignation, and with the approval of the
press-censor secured beforehand, hastened home--an entresol where
he lived in a mess with others--to write an article that would be
the sublimest ever penned under the skies of the Philippines. The
Captain-General would leave disconsolate if he did not first enjoy
his dithyrambs, and this Ben-Zayb, in his kindness of heart, could
not allow. Hence he sacrificed the dinner and ball, nor did he sleep
that night.

Sonorous exclamations of horror, of indignation, to fancy that
the world was smashing to pieces and the stars, the eternal stars,
were clashing together! Then a mysterious introduction, filled with
allusions, veiled hints, then an account of the affair, and the
final peroration. He multiplied the flourishes and exhausted all his
euphemisms in describing the drooping shoulders and the tardy baptism
of salad his Excellency had received on his Olympian brow, he eulogized
the agility with which the General had recovered a vertical position,
placing his head where his legs had been, and vice versa, then intoned
a hymn to Providence for having so solicitously guarded those sacred
bones. The paragraph turned out to be so perfect that his Excellency
appeared as a hero, and fell higher, as Victor Hugo said.

He wrote, erased, added, and polished, so that, without wanting
in veracity--this was his special merit as a journalist--the whole
would be an epic, grand for the seven gods, cowardly and base for
the unknown thief, "who had executed himself, terror-stricken, and
in the very act convinced of the enormity of his crime."

He explained Padre Irene's act of plunging under the table as
"an impulse of innate valor, which the habit of a God of peace
and gentleness, worn throughout a whole life, had been unable to
extinguish," for Padre Irene had tried to hurl himself upon the
thief and had taken a straight course along the submensal route. In
passing, he sp