of truths which has taken the place
of fable. The sky is not a vault; the stars are not little lamps; the
moon is not a sportive huntress, but an opaque mass of stone; the sun is
not a gayly adorned and vagabond charioteer but a fixed fire; Scylla and
Charybdis are not nymphs but sunken rocks; the sirens are seals; and in
the order of personages, Mercury is Manzanedo; Mars is a clean-shaven
old man, the Count von Moltke; Nestor may be a gentleman in an overcoat,
who is called M. Thiers; Orpheus is Verdi; Vulcan is Krupp; Apollo is
any poet. Do you wish more? Well, then, Jupiter, a god who, if he
were living now, would deserve to be put in jail, does not launch the
thunderbolt, but the thunderbolt falls when electricity wills it. There
is no Parnassus; there is no Olympus; there is no Stygian lake; nor are
there any other Elysian Fields than those of Paris. There is no other
descent to hell than the descents of Geology, and this traveller, every
time he returns from it, declares that there are no damned souls in the
centre of the earth. There are no other ascents to heaven than those of
Astronomy, and she, on her return, declares that she has not seen the
six or seven circles of which Dante and the mystical dreamers of the
Middle Ages speak. She finds only stars and distances, lines, vast
spaces, and nothing more. There are now no false computations of the age
of the earth, for paleontology and prehistoric research have counted the
teeth of this skull in which we live and discovered the true age. Fable,
whether it be called paganism or Christian idealism, exists no longer,
and imagination plays only a secondary part. All the miracles possible
are such as I work, whenever I desire to do so, in my laboratory, with
my Bunsen pile, a conducting wire, and a magnetized needle. There are
now no other multiplications of loaves and fishes than those which
Industry makes, with her moulds and her machines, and those of the
printing press, which imitates Nature, taking from a single type
millions of copies. In short, my dear canon, orders have been given to
put on the retired list all the absurdities, lies, illusions, dreams,
sentimentalities, and prejudices which darken the understanding of man.
Let us rejoice at the fact."

When Pepe finished speaking, a furtive smile played upon the canon's
lips and his eyes were extraordinarily animated. Don Cayetano busied
himself in giving various forms--now rhomboidal, now prismatic--to a
lit