I feel for them."

"Then you would console them if it was for you they wept, young lady?"
said Dorothea.

"I don't know what I should do," said the girl; "I only know that there
are some of those ladies so cruel that they call their knights tigers and
lions and a thousand other foul names: and Jesus! I don't know what sort
of folk they can be, so unfeeling and heartless, that rather than bestow
a glance upon a worthy man they leave him to die or go mad. I don't know
what is the good of such prudery; if it is for honour's sake, why not
marry them? That's all they want."

"Hush, child," said the landlady; "it seems to me thou knowest a great
deal about these things, and it is not fit for girls to know or talk so
much."

"As the gentleman asked me, I could not help answering him," said the
girl.

"Well then," said the curate, "bring me these books, senor landlord, for
I should like to see them."

"With all my heart," said he, and going into his own room he brought out
an old valise secured with a little chain, on opening which the curate
found in it three large books and some manuscripts written in a very good
hand. The first that he opened he found to be "Don Cirongilio of Thrace,"
and the second "Don Felixmarte of Hircania," and the other the "History
of the Great Captain Gonzalo Hernandez de Cordova, with the Life of Diego
Garcia de Paredes."

When the curate read the two first titles he looked over at the barber
and said, "We want my friend's housekeeper and niece here now."

"Nay," said the barber, "I can do just as well to carry them to the yard
or to the hearth, and there is a very good fire there."

"What! your worship would burn my books!" said the landlord.

"Only these two," said the curate, "Don Cirongilio, and Felixmarte."

"Are my books, then, heretics or phlegmaties that you want to burn them?"
said the landlord.

"Schismatics you mean, friend," said the barber, "not phlegmatics."

"That's it," said the landlord; "but if you want to burn any, let it be
that about the Great Captain and that Diego Garcia; for I would rather
have a child of mine burnt than either of the others."

"Brother," said the curate, "those two books are made up of lies, and are
full of folly and nonsense; but this of the Great Captain is a true
history, and contains the deeds of Gonzalo Hernandez of Cordova, who by
his many and great achievements earned the title all over the world of
the Great Captain, a famous and ill