ering garments of linen, wool, and
silk, I promise you that this miserable Juan would have had to go for
more than four Sundays without a clean shirt to put on or a mouthful
to eat, unless he had begged it from door to door.

The years passed by to find Maria every day more beautiful, and her
father every day more blind and more desirous to see, until his
affliction and trouble took such forcible possession of his breast and
mind, that Maria saw as clear as daylight that if her father did not
recover his sight, he would die of grief. Maria thereupon straightway
took her father and led him to the house of an Arabian physician of
great learning who dwelt at Toledo, and told the Moor to see if there
were any cure for the old man's sight. The Arabian examined and
touched Juan, and made this and that experiment with him, and
everything prospered, in that the physician swore great oaths by the
heel-bone of Mohammed that there was a complete certainty of curing
Juan and making him to see his daughter again, if only he, the
physician, were paid for the cure with five hundred _maravedis_ all in
gold. A sad termination for such a welcome beginning, for the two
unhappy creatures, Juan and Maria, had neither _maravedi_ nor
_cuarto_ in the money box! So they went thence all downcast, and Maria
never ceased praying to his Holiness Saint John and his Holiness Saint
James (the patron saint of Spain) to repair to their assistance in
this sad predicament.

"In what way," conjectured she inwardly, "in what way can I raise five
hundred _maravedis_ to be quits with the Moor who will give back his
sight to my poor old father? All! I have it. I am a pretty maid, and
suitors innumerable, commoners and nobles, pay their addresses and
compliments to me. But all are trifling youths who only care for
love-making and who seek light o' loves rather than spouses according
to the law of the Lord Jesus Christ. I remember, notwithstanding, that
opposite our house lives the sword-cutler, Master Palomo, who is
always looking at me and never speaks to me, and the Virgin assist me,
he appears a man of very good condition for a husband; but what
maiden, unless she were cross-eyed, or hunch-backed, could like a man
with such a flat nose, with that skin the color of a ripe date, with
those eyes like a dead calf's, and with those huge hands, which are
more like the paws of a wild beast that the belongings of a person who
with them should softly caress the wom