ir Francis
Drake.

"We have been great sufferers, senors,--ah, great sufferers," snuffled
the bishop, quoting Scripture, after the fashion of the day, glibly
enough, but often much too irreverently for me to repeat, so boldly were
his texts travestied, and so freely interlarded by grumblings at Tita
and the mosquitoes. "Great sufferers, truly; but there shall be a
remnant,--ah, a remnant like the shaking of the olive tree and the
gleaning grapes when the vintage is done.--Ah! Gold? Yes, I trust
Our Lady's mercies are not shut up, nor her arms shortened.--Look,
senors!"--and he pointed majestically out of the window. "It looks gold!
it smells of gold, as I may say, by a poetical license. Yea, the very
waves, as they ripple past us, sing of gold, gold, gold!"

"It is a great privilege," said the intendant, "to have comfort so
gracefully administered at once by a churchman and a scholar."

"A poet, too," said Don Pedro. "You have no notion what sweet sonnets--"

"Hush, Don Pedro--hush! If I, a mateless bird, have spent an idle hour
in teaching lovers how to sing, why, what of that? I am a churchman,
senors; but I am a man and I can feel, senors; I can sympathize; I can
palliate; I can excuse. Who knows better than I how much human nature
lurks in us fallen sons of Adam? Tita!"

"Um?" said the trembling girl, with a true Indian grunt.

"Fill his excellency the intendant's glass. Does much more treasure come
down, illustrious senor? May the poor of Mary hope for a few more crumbs
from their Mistress's table?"

"Not a pezo, I fear. The big white cow up there"--and he pointed to the
Horqueta--"has been milked dry for this year."

"Ah!" And he looked up at the magnificent snow peak. "Only good to cool
wine with, eh? and as safe for the time being as Solomon's birds."

"Solomon's birds? Explain your recondite allusion, my lord."

"Enlighten us, your excellency, enlighten us."

"Ah! thereby hangs a tale. You know the holy birds who run up and down
on the Prado at Seville among the ladies' pretty feet,--eh? with hooked
noses and cinnamon crests? Of course. Hoopoes--Upupa, as the classics
have it. Well, senors, once on a time, the story goes, these hoopoes
all had golden crowns on their heads; and, senors, they took the
consequences--eh? But it befell on a day that all the birds and beasts
came to do homage at the court of his most Catholic majesty King
Solomon, and among them came these same hoopoes; and they had a lit