her, without head or tail! What have Cascajo, and the
brooches and the proverbs and the airs, to do with what I say? Look
here, fool and dolt (for so I may call you when you don't understand
my words and run away from good fortune), if I had said that my
daughter was to throw herself down from a tower, or go roaming the
world, as the Infanta Dona Urraca wanted to do, you would be right in
not giving way to my will; but if in an instant, in less than the
twinkling of an eye, I put the 'Don' and 'my lady' on her back, and
take her out of the stubble and place her under a canopy, on a dais,
and on a couch with more velvet cushions than all the Almohades of
Morocco ever had in their family, why won't you consent and fall in
with my wishes?"

"Do you know why, husband?" replied Teresa; "because of the proverb
that says, 'Who covers thee, discovers thee.' At the poor man people
only throw a hasty glance; on the rich man they fix their eyes; and if
the said rich man was once on a time poor, it is then there is the
sneering and the tattle and spite of backbiters; and in the streets
here they swarm as thick as bees."

"Look here, Teresa," said Sancho, "and listen to what I am now going
to say to you; maybe you never heard it in all your life; and I do not
give my own notions, for what I am about to say are the opinions of
his Reverence the preacher who preached in this town last Lent, and
who said, if I remember rightly, that all things present that our eyes
behold, bring themselves before us and remain and fix themselves on
our memory much better and more forcibly than things past." (These
observations which Sancho makes here are the other ones on account of
which the translator says he regards this chapter as apocryphal,
inasmuch as they are beyond Sancho's capacity.) "Whence it arises," he
continued, "that when we see any person well dressed and making a
figure with rich garments and retinue of servants, it seems to lead
and impel us perforce to respect him, though memory may at the same
time recall to us some lowly condition in which we have seen him, but
which, whether it may have been poverty or low birth, being now a
thing of the past has no existence; while the only thing that has any
existence is what we see before us; and if this person whom fortune
has raised from his original lowly state (these were the very words
the padre used) to his present height of prosperity, be well-bred,
generous, courteous to all, without