The whole city had known don Matias when he went around in peasant’s clogs and worked a tiny orchard he had secured on lease.  His son, a virtual half-wit, who took advantage of every opportunity to rifle the old man’s pockets and spend the money in Valencia with bull-fighters, gamblers and horse-dealers, went barefoot in those days, scampering about the roads with the children of the gipsies encamped in El Alborchi.  His daughter—­the now well-behaved, the now modest, Remedios, who was passing day after day at complicated needlework under the tutelage of dona Bernarda—­had grown up like a wild rabbit of the fields, repeating with shocking fidelity all the oaths and vile language she heard from the carters her father drank with.

“But you have to be an ox to get rich these days!” the barber Cupido would say when don Matias came up for discussion.

Little by little the man had worked his way into the orange export business—­to England especially.  His first stock he bought on credit; and at once Fortune began to blow upon him with bloated cheeks, and she was still puffing and puffing!  His wealth had been accumulated in a few years.  In crises where the most powerful vessels foundered, that rude and heavy bark, sailing on without chart or compass, suffered not the slightest harm.  His shipments always arrived at the psychological moment.  The fancy, carefully-selected oranges of other merchants would land at Liverpool or London when the markets were glutted and prices were falling scandalously.  The lucky dolt would send anything at all along, whatever was available, cheap; and circumstances always seemed to favor him with an empty market and prices sky-high regardless of quality.  He realized fabulous profits.  He had nothing but scorn for all the wiseacres who subscribed to the English papers, received daily bulletins and compared market quotations from year to year, getting, for all their pains, results that made them tear their hair.  He was an ignoramus and he was proud of it!  He trusted to his lucky star.  Whenever he thought it best, he would ship his produce off from the port of Valencia, and—­there you are!—­it would always turn out that his oranges found no competition on arrival and brought the highest prices.  More than once it had happened that rough weather held his vessel up.  Well—­the market would sell out, and his shipment would have a clear field just the same!

Within two years he had a place in town and had become a “personage.”  He would smilingly declare that he wouldn’t “go to the wall for under eighty thousand duros.”  Later, ever on the wing, his fortune reached dizzy heights.  Folks whispered in superstitious awe the figures he made in net profits at the end of every sailing.  He owned warehouses as large as churches in the vicinity of Alcira, employing armies of girls to wrap the oranges and regiments of carpenters to make the crates.  He would buy the crop of an entire orchard at a single glance and never be more