f memory, great heir of fame,

Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory
and fame which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof
that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, and
even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has put up a
tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his incredible
house and done him the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very
little house, as small as Ariosto's in Ferrara, which he said was so apt
for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad
neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the
days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of
these a gentleman was stabbed near the author's house. The alarm brought
Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the dying man he
was promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sisters, and his
niece, who were living with him and who were taken up as accessories
before the fact. The whole abomination is matter of judicial record,
and it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one
sister was a nun) because they were living in that infamous place. The
man whose renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than
the name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on the same day),
was then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had great
ado to establish the innocence of himself and his household. To be
sure, his _Don Quixote_ had not yet appeared, though he is said to have
finished the first part in that miserable abode in that vile region;
but he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy
of "Numancia," and he had held public employs and lived near enough to
courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish
and very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally
against him. In his declaration before the magistrates he says that
his literary reputation procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and
scholars, who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies of his
family cared for themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.

They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a
stone terrace dropping from the wide,