and says than she.

On returning home from any of these excursions, I renew my entreaties to
my father to allow me to go back to you, in order that the wished-for
moment may at last arrive in which I shall see myself elevated to the
priesthood. But my father is so pleased to have me with him, he is so
happy here in the village, taking care of his plantations, exercising
the judicial and executive authority of squire, paying homage to Pepita,
and consulting her in everything as his Egeria, that he always finds,
and will find perhaps for months to come, some plausible pretext to keep
me here. Now he has to clarify the wine of I know not how many casks;
now he has to decant more wine still; now it is necessary to hoe around
the vines; now to plow the olive-groves and dig around the roots of the
olives; in fine, he keeps me here against my wishes--though I should not
say "against my wishes," for it gives me great pleasure to be with my
father, who is so good to me.

The evil is, that, with this way of life, I fear I shall grow too
material. I am conscious in my devotions of a certain aridity of spirit.
My religious fervor diminishes; common life begins to penetrate, to
infiltrate itself into my nature; when I pray, I suffer distractions; in
my solitary meditations, when the soul should raise itself up to God, I
can no longer concentrate my thought as formerly. My sensibility of
heart, on the other hand, that refuses to occupy itself with any worthy
object, that does not employ and consume itself on its legitimate ends,
wells forth and, as it were, overflows, at times, for objects and under
circumstances that have something in them of puerile, that seem to me
ridiculous, of which I am ashamed. If I awaken in the silence of the
night and hear by chance some love-lorn rustic singing, to the sound of
his badly played guitar, a verse of a _fandango_ or a _rondena_, neither
very discreet, nor very poetical, nor very delicate, I am wont to be
affected as if I were listening to some celestial melody; a feeling of
pity, childish and insensate, comes over me at times. The other day the
children of my father's overseer stole a nest full of young sparrows,
and on seeing the little birds, not yet fledged, torn thus violently
from their tender mother, I felt a sudden pang of anguish, and I confess
I could not restrain my tears. A few days before this, a peasant had
brought in from the fields a calf that had broken its leg; he was about