bad! I wish the very stones of Orbajosa
might rise up against them; but I have given my word to the governor,
and up to the present---"

He scratched his head, gathered his gloomy brows in a frown, and with
ever-increasing difficulty of speech continued:

"I may be brutal, disagreeable, ignorant, quarrelsome, obstinate, and
every thing else you choose, but in honor I yield to no one."

"What a pity of the Cid Campeador!" said Dona Perfecta contemptuously.
"Don't you agree with me, Senor Penitentiary, that there is not a single
man left in Orbajosa who has any shame in him?"

"That is a serious view to take of the case," responded the capitular,
without looking at his friend, or removing from his chin the hand on
which he rested his thoughtful face; "but I think this neighborhood has
accepted with excessive submission the heavy yoke of militarism."

Licurgo and the three countrymen laughed boisterously.

"When the soldiers and the new authorities," said Dona Perfecta, "have
taken from us our last real, when the town has been disgraced, we will
send all the valiant men of Orbajosa in a glass case to Madrid to be put
in the museum there or exhibited in the streets."

"Long life to the mistress!" cried the man called Vejarruco
demonstratively. "What she says is like gold. It won't be said on my
account that there are no brave men here, for if I am not with the
Aceros it is only because I have a wife and three children, and if any
thing was to happen--if it wasn't for that--"

"But haven't you given your word to the governor, too?" said Dona
Perfecta.

"To the governor?" cried the man named Frasquito Gonzalez. "There is not
in the whole country a scoundrel who better deserves a bullet. Governor
and Government, they are all of a piece. Last Sunday the priest said so
many rousing things in his sermon about the heresies and the profanities
of the people of Madrid--oh! it was worth while hearing him! Finally, he
shouted out in the pulpit that religion had no longer any defenders."

"Here is the great Cristobal Ramos!" said Dona Perfecta, clapping the
Centaur on the back. "He mounts his horse and rides about in the Plaza
and up and down the high-road to attract the attention of the soldiers;
when they see him they are terrified at the fierce appearance of the
hero, and they all run away, half-dead with fright."

Dona Perfecta ended with an exaggerated laugh, which the profound
silence of her hearers made still more ir