inted
with more sins than are known to the confessor; but with this
difference, that the confessor learns them to keep all secret, but you
to make them the public talk of the taverns."

A muleteer who heard this, for all kinds of people were continually
listening to him, said aloud, "There is little or nothing that you can
say of us, Senor Phial, for we are people of great worth, and very
useful servants to the commonwealth." To which the man of glass replied,
"The honour of the master exalts the honour of the servant. You,
therefore, who call those who hire your mules your masters, see whom you
serve, and what honour you may borrow from them; for your employers are
some of the dirtiest rubbish that this earth endures.

"Once, when I was not a man of glass, I was travelling on a mule which I
had hired, and I counted in her master one hundred and twenty-one
defects, all capital ones, and all enemies to the human kind. All
muleteers have a touch of the ruffian, a spice of the thief, and a dash
of the mountebank. If their masters, as they call those they take on
their mules, be of the butter-mouthed kind, they play more pranks with
them than all the rogues of this city could perform in a year. If they
be strangers, the muleteers rob them; if students, they malign them; if
monks, they blaspheme them; but if soldiers, they tremble before them.
These men, with the sailors, the carters, and the arrieros or pack
carriers, lead a sort of life which is truly singular, and belongs to
themselves alone.

"The carter passes the greater part of his days in a space not more than
a yard and a half long, for there cannot be much more between the yoke
of his mules and the mouth of his cart. He is singing for one half of
his time, and blaspheming the other; and if he have to drag one of his
wheels out of a hole in the mire, he is more aided, as it might seem,
by two great oaths than by three strong mules.

"The mariners are a pleasant people, but little like those of the towns,
and they can speak no other language than that used in ships. When the
weather is fine they are very diligent, but very idle, when it is
stormy. During the tempest they order much and obey little. Their ship,
which is their mess-room, is also their god, and their pastime is the
torment endured by sea-sick passengers.

"As to the mule-carriers, they are a race which has taken out a divorce
from all sheets, and has married the pack-saddle. So diligent and
carefu