evil of a Brutandor gave me the other day. I was walking
down the Calle de Alcala, with the purpose of witnessing the entrance of
the leaders of liberty (as you call them now). I was accompanied by the
mayordomo and two pupils, when I saw in the procession, lounging in a
barouche in which rode two generals in full uniform, my Brutandor,
saluting the people as though he were an emperor!... _Ave Maria
Purisima!_ I said to myself, making the sign of the cross; I could
scarcely believe the evidence of my own eyes. Of course I knew that this
clown mixed in politics, and that he had slobbered a few articles in the
papers, although I always imagine that they are about as much his as the
compositions that you used to write for him in school; but how could I
ever imagine that I should be destined to behold him transformed into a
person of importance, riding underneath the triumphal arches as though
he had just been conquering the Gauls or overcoming the Scythians? And I
declare the idiot was swelling up, swaying round in the barouche, as
though he had ridden all his life in one!"

"You have always been unjust toward Mendoza, Don Juan. More portentous
things than that remain to be seen."

"I believe you, even if you don't take your oath on it. If these are the
men by whom you expect to regenerate the country, I have no doubt that I
shall see him very soon made into mince-meat."

And cursing the glorious revolution, and scorning in the person of
Brutandor the whole confraternity, he took a most friendly farewell of
Rivera, for whom he had never ceased to feel a genuine fondness.

Little had Miguel cared for the revolutionary movement, although he
figured as one of the most earnest adepts of democratic doctrines. The
cultivation of his mind by an incessant devotion to the best reading,
and his domestic life, took too much of his attention for him to give
to politics more than a very small part of his energies; the very
journal, the management of which he had taken hold of with enthusiasm,
began to bore him; the everlasting polemics, the disgusting phraseology
of the leaders, soon wearied him, and he longed for the time to come
when he could resign his position, and give himself altogether to more
serious and useful labors.

He was happy in his home life, but not in the way that he had expected
to be. For he had imagined before he was married that love and the
joyful experiences which love would bring would be sufficient to fill