ute had entered her
house; cried herself up for a saint, and her husband for a pattern of
excellence; and called out to a servant wench to run and fetch her
husband's patent of nobility out of the chest, that she might show it to
the Senor Lieutenant. He would then be able to judge whether the wife of
so respectable a man was capable of anything but what was quite correct.
If she did keep a lodging-house, it was because she could not help it.
God knows if she would not rather have some comfortable independence to
live upon at her ease. The lieutenant, tired of her volubility and her
bouncing about the patent of gentility, said to her, "Sister hostess, I
am willing to believe that your husband is a gentleman, but then you
must allow he is only a gentleman innkeeper." The landlady replied with
great dignity, "And where is the family in the world, however good its
blood may be, but you may pick some holes in its coat?" "Well, all I
have to say, sister, is, that you must put on your clothes, and come
away to prison." This brought her down from her high flights at once;
she tore her hair, cried, screamed, and prayed, but all in vain; the
inexorable lieutenant carried the whole party off to prison, that is to
say, the Breton, Colindres, and the landlady. I learned afterwards that
the Breton lost his fifty crowns, and was condemned besides to pay
costs; the landlady had to pay as much more. Colindres was let off scot
free, and the very day she was liberated she picked up a sailor, out of
whom she made good her disappointment in the affair of the Breton. Thus
you see, Scipio, what serious troubles arose from my gluttony.

_Scip._ Say rather from the rascality of your master.

_Berg._ Nay but listen, for worse remains to be told, since I am loth to
speak ill of alguazil and attorneys.

_Scip._ Ay, but speaking ill of one is not speaking ill of all. There is
many and many an attorney who is honest and upright. They do not all
take fees from both parties in a suit; nor extort more than their right;
nor go prying about into other people's business in order to entangle
them in the webs of the law; nor league with the justice to fleece one
side and skin the other. It is not every alguazil that is in collusion
with thieves and vagabonds, or keeps a decoy-duck in the shape of a
mistress, as your master did. Very many of them are gentlemen in feeling
and conduct; neither arrogant nor insolent, nor rogues and knaves, like
those who go