h very great pleasure, without interrupting you, unless I see it to
be necessary.

_Berg._ It appears to me that the first time I saw the sun was in
Seville, in its slaughter-houses, which were outside the Puerta do la
Carne; wence I should imagine (were it not for what I shall afterwards
tell you) that my progenitors were some of those mastiff's which are
bred by those ministers of confusion who are called butchers. The first
I knew for a master, was one Nicholas the Pugnosed, a stout, thick-set,
passionate fellow, as all butchers are. This Nicholas taught me and
other whelps to run at bulls in company with old dogs and catch them by
the ears. With great ease I became an eagle among my fellows in this
respect.

_Scip._ I do not wonder, Berganza, that ill-doing is so easily learned,
since it comes by a natural obliquity.

_Berg._ What can I say to you, brother Scipio, of what I saw in those
slaughter-houses, and the enormous things that were done in them? In the
first place, you must understand that all who work in them, from the
lowest to the highest, are people without conscience or humanity,
fearing neither the king nor his justice; most of them living in
concubinage; carrion birds of prey; maintaining themselves and their
doxies by what they steal. On all flesh days, a great number of wenches
and young chaps assemble in the slaughtering place before dawn, all of
them with bags which come empty and go away full of pieces of meat. Not
a beast is killed out of which these people do not take tithes, and that
of the choicest and most savoury pickings. The masters trust implicitly
in these honest folk, not with the hope that they will not rob them (for
that is impossible), but that they may use their knives with some
moderation. But what struck me as the worst thing of all, was that these
butchers make no more of killing a man than a cow. They will quarrel for
straws, and stick a knife into a person's body as readily as they would
fell an ox. It is a rare thing for a day to pass without brawls and
bloodshed, and even murder. They all pique themselves on being men of
mettle, and they observe, too, some punctilios of the bravo; there is
not one of them but has his guardian angel in the Plaza de San
Francesco, whom he propitiates with sirloins, and beef tongues.

_Scip._ If you mean to dwell at such length, friend Berganza, on the
characteristics and faults of all the masters you have had, we had
better pray to heaven to