aw and understood that the evil was very great.
She discussed the matter with her steward, or _ministro_ as he was
called, who was none other than the aforesaid middleman; and the more she
discussed the question, the more hopeless the question appeared. The
steward held a contract from her dead husband for a number of years. He
had regularly paid the yearly sums agreed upon, and it would be
impossible to remove him for several years to come. He, of course, was
strenuously opposed to any change, and did his best to make himself
appear as an angel of mercy and justice, presiding over a happy family of
rejoicing peasants in the heart of a terrestrial paradise. Unfortunately
for himself, however, he had not at first understood the motive which
prompted Corona's inquiries. He supposed in the beginning that she was
not satisfied with the amount of rent he paid, and that at the expiration
of his contract she intended to raise the sum; so that, on the first
occasion when she sent for him, he had drawn a piteous picture of the
peasant's condition, and had expatiated with eloquence on his own
poverty, and on the extreme difficulty of collecting any rents at all. It
was not until he discovered that Corona's chief preoccupation was for the
welfare of her tenants that he changed his tactics, and endeavoured to
prove that all was for the best upon the best of all possible estates.

Then, to his great astonishment, Corona informed him that his contract
would not be renewed, and that at the expiration of his term she would
collect her rents herself. It had taken her long to understand the
situation, but when she had comprehended it, she made up her mind that
something must be done. If her fortune had depended solely upon the
income she received from the Astrardente lands, she would have made up
her mind to reduce herself to penury rather than allow things to go in
the way they were going. Fortunately she was rich, and if she had not all
the experience necessary to deal with such matters, she had plenty of
goodwill, plenty of generosity, and plenty of money. In her simple
theory of agrarian economy the best way to improve an estate seemed to be
to spend the income arising from it directly upon its improvement, until
she could take the whole management of it into her own hands. The
trouble, as she thought, was that there was too little money among the
peasants; the best way to help them was to put money within their reach.
The only questi