was gone.  He then proposed to play for money:  Lope was unwilling, but was so importuned on all hands, that at last he consented; and such was his run of luck that he left his opponent without a maravedi.  So intense was the loser’s vexation, that he rolled and writhed upon the ground and knocked his head against it.  Lope, however, like a good-natured, liberal gentleman, raised him up, returned all the money he had won, including the sixteen ducats the price of the ass, and even divided what he had left among the bystanders.  Great was the surprise of them all at this extraordinary liberality; and had they lived in the time of the great Tamerlane, they would have made him king of the water-carriers.

Accompanied by a great retinue, Lope returned to the city, where he related his adventure to Tomas, who in turn recounted to him his own partial success.  There was no tavern, or eating house, or rogues’ gathering, in which the play for the ass was not known, the dispute about the tail, and the high spirit and liberality of the Asturian; but as the mob are for the most part unjust, and more prone to evil than to good, they thought nothing of the generosity and high mettle of the great Lope, but only of the tail; and he had scarcely been two days carrying water about the city, before he found himself pointed at by people who cried, “There goes the man of the tail!” The boys caught up the cry, and no sooner had Lope shown himself in any street, than it rang from one end to the other with shouts of “Asturiano, give up the tail!  Give up the tail, Asturiano!” At first Lope said not a word, thinking that his silence would tire out his persecutors; but in this he was mistaken, for the more he held his tongue the more the boys wagged theirs, till at last he lost patience, and getting off his ass began to drub the boys; but this was only cutting off the heads of Hydra, and for every one he laid low by thrashing some boy, there sprang up on the instant, not seven but seven hundred more, that began to pester him more and more for the tail.  At last he found it expedient to retire to the lodgings he had taken apart from his companion in order to avoid Argueello, and to keep close there until the influence of the malignant planet which then ruled the hours should have passed away, and the boys should have forgotten to ask him for the tail.  For two days he never left the house except by night to go and see Tomas, and ask him how he got on.  Tomas told him that since he had given the paper to Costanza he had never been able to speak a single word to her, and that she seemed to be more reserved than ever.  Once he had found as he thought an opportunity to accost her, but before he could get out a word, she stopped him, saying, “Tomas, I am in no pain now, and therefore have no need of your words or of your prayers.  Be content that I do not accuse you to the Inquisition, and give yourself no further trouble.”  But she made this declaration without any expression of anger in her