vely flat and stupid.

Alzugaray was studying law too, and had obtained a clerkship in a
Ministry. Alzugaray got drunk on music. His great enthusiasm was for
playing the 'cello. Caesar used to call on him at his office and at
home.

The clerks at the Ministry seemed to Caesar to form part of an inferior
human race.

At Alzugaray's house, Caesar felt at home. Ignacio's mother, a lady with
white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited
the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray's sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly
lass, was often ill.

All the family thought a great deal of Caesar; his advice was followed
at that house, and one of the operations on 'change that he recommended
making with some Foreign bonds that Ignacio's mother was holding at the
time of the Cuban War, gave everybody in the house an extraordinary idea
of young Moncada's financial talents.

Caesar kept his balance among his separate activities; one set of
studies complemented others. This diversity of points of view kept him
from taking the false and one-sided position that those who preoccupy
themselves with one branch of knowledge exclusively get into.

The one-sided position is most useful to a specialist, to a man who
expects to remain satisfied in the place where chance has put him; but
it is useless for one who proposes to enter life with his blood afire.

As almost always occurs, the projecting of ideas of distinct derivation
and of different orders into the same plane, carried Caesar into
absolute scepticism, scepticism about things, and especially scepticism
about the instrument of knowledge.

His negation had no reference,--far from it,--to women, to love, or
to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of
literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism
was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a
region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and
returns with a belief that even the compass is not exact in what it
shows.

"Nothing absolute exists," Caesar told himself, "neither science nor
mathematics nor even the truth, can be an absolute thing."

Arriving at this result surprised Caesar a good deal. On finding that he
was not successful in lighting on a philosophical system which would be
a guide to him and which could be reasoned out like a theorem, he sought
within the purely subjective for something that might satisfy him and
serve a