At the conclusion of the mass, the imposing personages would nod their heads, saluting the faithful nearest them.  “Good day!” To these, it was as if the sun had just arisen:  the hours before did not count.  And the notary with meek voice would enlarge his response:  “Good day, Senor Marquis!” “Good day, Senor Baron!” Although his relations never went beyond this salutation, Ferragut used to feel toward these noble personages the sympathy that the customers have for an establishment, looking upon them with affectionate eyes for many years without presuming to exchange more than a greeting with them.

His son Ulysses was exceedingly bored as he followed the monotonous incidents of the chanted mass in the darkened, almost deserted, church.  The rays of the sun, oblique beams of gold that filtered in from above, illuminating the spirals of dust, flies and moths, made him think in a homesick way of the lush green of the orchard, the white spots of the hamlets, the black smoke columns of the harbor filled with steamships, and the triple file of bluish convexities crowned with froth that were discharging their contents with a sonorous surge upon the bronze-colored beach.

When the embroidered mantles of the three priests ceased to gleam before the high altar, and another priest in black and white appeared in the pulpit, Ulysses would turn his glance toward a side chapel.  The sermon always represented for him a half hour of somnolence, peopled with his own lively imaginings.  The first thing that his eyes used to see in the chapel of Santa Barbara was a chest nailed to the wall high above him, a sepulcher of painted wood with no other adornment than the inscription:  “Aqui yace Dona Constansa Augusta, Emperatriz de Grecia,”—­Here lies Constance Augusta, Empress of Greece.

The name of Greece always had the power of exciting the little fellow’s imagination.  His godfather, the lawyer Labarta, poet-laureate, could not repeat this name without a lively thrill passing across his grizzled beard and a new light in his eyes.  Sometimes the mysterious power of such a name evoked a new mystery and a more intense interest,—­Byzantium.  How could that august lady, sovereign of remote countries of magnificence and vision, have come to leave her remains in a murky chapel of Valencia within a great chest like those that treasured the remnants of old trumpery in the garrets of the notary?...

One day after mass Don Esteban had rapidly recounted her history to his little son.  She was the daughter of Frederick the Second of Suabia, a Hohenstaufen, an emperor of Germany who esteemed still more his crown of Sicily.  In the palaces of Palermo,—­veritable enchanted bowers of Oriental gardens,—­he had led the life both of pagan and savant, surrounded by poets and men of science (Jews, Mahometans and Christians), by Oriental dancers, alchemists, and ferocious Saracen Guards.  He legislated as did the jurisconsults of ancient Rome, at the same time writing the first