s lift her up as if she were
a feather and with a swift movement place her in the room. All was
changed. Suddenly a crash was heard, a violent blow that shook the house
to its foundations. Neither knew the cause of the noise. They trembled
and were silent.

It was the moment in which the dragon had broken the table in the
dining-room.

CHAPTER XXV

UNFORESEEN EVENTS--A PASSING DISAGREEMENT

The scene changes. We see before us a handsome room, bright, modest,
gay, comfortable, and surprisingly clean. A fine matting covers the
floor, and the white walls are covered with good prints of saints and
some sculptures of doubtful artistic value. The old mahogany of the
furniture shines with the polish of many Saturday rubbings, and the
altar, on which a magnificent Virgin, dressed in blue and silver,
receives domestic worship, is covered with innumerable pretty trifles,
half sacred, half profane. There are on it, besides, little pictures in
beads, holy-water fonts, a watch-case with an Agnes Dei, a Palm Sunday
palm-branch, and not a few odorless artificial flowers. A number of
oaken bookshelves contain a rich and choice library, in which Horace,
the Epicurean and Sybarite, stands side by side with the tender Virgil,
in whose verses we see the heart of the enamored Dido throbbing
and melting; Ovid the large-nosed, as sublime as he is obscene and
sycophantic, side by side with Martial, the eloquent and witty vagabond;
Tibullus the impassioned, with Cicero the grand; the severe Titus Livius
with the terrible Tacitus, the scourge of the Caesars; Lucretius the
pantheist; Juvenal, who flayed with his pen; Plautus, who composed
the best comedies of antiquity while turning a mill-wheel; Seneca the
philosopher, of whom it is said that the noblest act of his life was his
death; Quintilian the rhetorician; the immoral Sallust, who speaks so
eloquently of virtue; the two Plinys; Suetonius and Varro--in a word,
all the Latin letters from the time when they stammered their first word
with Livius Andronicus until they exhaled their last sigh with Rutilius.

But while making this unnecessary though rapid enumeration, we have not
observed that two women have entered the room. It is very early, but
the Orbajosans are early risers. The birds are singing to burst their
throats in their cages; the church-bells are ringing for mass, and the
goats, going from house to house to be milked, are tinkling their bells
gayly.

The two ladies whom