ment and instruction."

"Stuff and nonsense!"

Translation of Clara Bell.

DONA PERFECTA'S DAUGHTER

From 'Dona Perfecta.' Copyright 1895, by Harper & Brothers

[Pepe Rey, a young engineer, arrives at Orbajosa to marry his
cousin Rosario, the match having been made up between his
father and Dona Perfecta, the girl's mother, who is warmly
attached to the father of Pepe, her brother, and furthermore
under heavy obligations to him for his excellent management
of her large property interests. The landscape is the arid
and poverty-stricken country of central Spain, though the
town itself--"seated on the slope of a hill from the midst of
whose closely clustered houses arose many dark towers, and on
the height above it the ruins of a dilapidated castle"--such
a town would probably be more appreciated by a traveler from
abroad and a lover of the picturesque, than by a Spaniard,
too familiar with its type. Orbajosa is a little place, full
of narrow prejudices and vanities. Pepe Rey, with his modern
ways, soon finds that he is wounding these prejudices at
every turn. We look on with pained surprise at the
difficulties that grow up around the young man, an excellent
and kind-hearted fellow. Lawsuits are multiplied against him;
he is turned out of the cathedral by order of the bishop for
strolling about during service-time to look at some
architectural features; and he is refused the hand of his
cousin. Dona Perfecta herself joins in this hostility, which
finally develops into a venomous bitterness that menaces his
life. Such a feeling was not the outgrowth of mere provincial
narrowness: we see in the end that it was the result of the
plot of Maria Remedios, a woman of a humble sort, who aspired
to secure the heiress Rosario for her own chubby-faced
home-bred son. She influenced the village priest, and he
influenced Dona Perfecta. Early in the day the young engineer
would have abandoned the sinister place but for Rosario, who
really loved him. She conveyed to him, on a scrap from the
margin of a newspaper, the message:

"They say you are going away. If you do, I shall die."

She is a charming picture of girlhood,--lovely, true-hearted,
affectionate, aspiring to be heroic, and yet crippled at last
by a filial conscience and the long