some
skill upon the guitar and the mandolin? Could I not contend in most
exercises where strength and activity were required, with any? Had I not
travelled and seen something of the world and its ways? Ay, marry, and a
little more of both than was usual for young gentlemen of fortune!

Of personal advantages it might not become me to speak; but the truth
requires me to say that Nature had dealt very handsomely by me. And
now I ask of the fair reader,--the unfair one I put out of court on
the occasion,--"Are not these very pretty chances with which to woo
fortune?" Less sanguine spirits would perhaps have sighed for more, and
asked for a hundred gifts, of whose use and value I knew nothing,--such
as birth, family influence, and the like. As for me, I was content with
the "hand of trumps" Fate had dealt me; I owned frankly that if I lost
the game, it must be for lack of skill, and not of luck.

My plans were very simple. Once at Guajuaqualla, I should find out where
Donna Maria de los Dolores lived, and then, providing myself with a
suitable equipage and servants, I should proceed to pay my addresses
in all form, affecting to have resumed my real rank and station, from
which, on our first acquaintance, a passing caprice had withdrawn me.
I anticipated, of course, very shrewd inquiries as to my family and
fortune; but I trusted to "native wit" to satisfy these, secretly
resolving at the time that I would avoid lying for the future. And _a
propos_ of this propensity, I had never indulged in it, save from that
vagrant impulse that tempts a child to scamper over the flower-plat of
a garden, instead of keeping to the gravel,--the great charm being found
in the secret that it "was wrong." And, oh, ye dear, good, excellent
souls whose instincts are always correct, who can pass knockers on doors
and not wish to wring them off; who see gas-lamps in lonely spots,
and never think of breaking them; who neither "humbug" the stupid, nor
mistify the vain; who "take life" seriously,--forgive the semi-barbarism
of our Celtic tastes, which leads us to regard "fun" as the very honey
of existence, and leads us to extract it from every flower in life's
path!

When I "lied,"--as only the great "Pinto" ever lied more atrociously,--I
was more amused by my own extravagances than were my listeners. I threw
out my inventions among stupid folk as a rich man flings his guinea
among a group of beggars, to enjoy the squabbling and contending for
suc