nown that he was descended from the Moors.

In all the village there was not a man could handle the quarter-staff
like Sebastian, and so correct was his aim that, with a sling, he would
at a hundred yards hurl a stone and hit a bull between the eyes, and so
kill it.

With his knife he was equally skilful, for he could use the blade to
pick up the oil from his plate instead of licking it up with a spoon,
or, in a quarrel, make it find a sheath in the leg or arm of a rival.

Now, this Sebastian, with all his ingenuity and merriment, had, like
most men, a grievance; but, unlike most men's grievances, his was
against the good St. Vincent, whose patched-up body (some of it, having
decayed, being filled up with wax) is entombed in different cathedrals
throughout Spain and Portugal, each cathedral professing to possess the
veritable body of the veritable saint.

But in this plurality of St. Vincent there is nothing singular; for did
they not fill three large ships with the eye-teeth of good St. James of
Compostella when they were written for from Rome, and did not the Pope
declare them all genuine teeth?

Spain, in her religious fanaticism, is no more like other countries than
Sebastian de las Cabras was like other men.

St. Vincent, be it known, is worshipped in the Peninsula as the guardian
saint against that horrible scourge, small-pox.

In Galliza it is declared all diseases and misfortunes in life were
produced in order that there should be patron saints; and this is just
as true as the saying in Leon, that wheat was produced so that there
might be stomachs.

Sebastian de las Cabras cared neither for the saints nor for the
sayings; he feared neither the law nor the evil one; but he quailed
before his wife, D. Barbara, whose beauty, like that of the demolished
alcazar at Ecija, was a thing of the past.

D. Barbara was, however, a woman who made herself respected; and of all
the saints in the calendar there was none for whom she had so great a
veneration as St. Vincent, who had saved her when suffering from
small-pox.

Not the three wives who got up from their graves in Merida and appeared
to the husband to whom they had all been married, produced a more
startling effect on that widower than D. Barbara on her husband
Sebastian, when she would visit him as he was tending his herds on the
mountain sides, for no woman ever had such a tongue. Even the Archbishop
of Compostella, in pity to the clergy of his diocese,