anything.

The only defect they find in me is that I am too thin through
over-study. In order to have me grow fat they propose not to allow me
either to study or even to look at a book while I remain here; and,
besides this, to make me eat of as many choice dishes of meats and
confectionery as they know how to concoct in the village.

It is quite clear--I am to be stall-fed. There is not a single family of
our acquaintance that has not sent me some token of regard. Now it is a
sponge-cake, now a meat-salad, now a pyramid of sweetmeats, now a jug of
sirup.

And these presents which they send to the house are not the only
attentions they show me. I have also been invited to dinner by three or
four of the principal persons of the village.

To-morrow I am to dine at the house of the famous Pepita Ximenez, of
whom you have doubtless heard. No one here is ignorant of the fact that
my father is paying her his addresses.

My father, notwithstanding his fifty-five years, is so well preserved
that the finest young men of the village might feel envious of him. He
possesses, besides, the powerful attraction, irresistible to some women,
of his past conquests, of his celebrity, of having been a sort of Don
Juan Tenorio.

I have not yet made the acquaintance of Pepita Ximenez. Every one says
she is very beautiful. I suspect she will turn out to be a village
beauty, and somewhat rustic. From what I have heard of her I can not
quite decide whether, ethically speaking, she is good or bad; but I am
quite certain that she is possessed of great natural intelligence.
Pepita is about twenty years old and a widow; her married life lasted
only three years. She was the daughter of Dona Francisca Galvez, the
widow, as you know, of a retired captain

"Who left her at his death,
As sole inheritance, his honorable sword,"

as the poet says. Until her sixteenth year Pepita lived with her mother
in very straitened circumstances--bordering, indeed, upon absolute want.

She had an uncle called Don Gumersindo, the possessor of a small
entailed estate, one of those petty estates that, in olden times, owed
their foundation to a foolish vanity. Any ordinary person, with the
income derived from this estate, would have lived in continual
difficulties, burdened by debts, and altogether cut off from the display
and ceremony proper to his rank. But Don Gumersindo was an extraordinary
person--the very genius of economy. It could not be said of