“Joy! joy!  I have just read in one of the papers here that Caballuco had defeated Brigadier Batalla.”

“ORBAJOSA, December 12.

“I have a sad piece of news to give you.  The Penitentiary has ceased to exist for us; not precisely because he has passed to a better life, but because the poor man has been, ever since last April, so grief-stricken, so melancholy, so taciturn that you would not know him.  There is no longer in him even a trace of that Attic humor, that decorous and classic joviality which made him so pleasing.  He shuns every body; he shuts himself up in his house and receives no one; he hardly eats any thing, and he has broken off all intercourse with the world.  If you were to see him now you would not recognize him, for he is reduced to skin and bone.  The strangest part of the matter is that he has quarreled with his niece and lives alone, entirely alone, in a miserable cottage in the suburb of Baidejos.  They say now that he will resign his chair in the choir of the cathedral and go to Rome.  Ah!  Orbajosa will lose much in losing her great Latinist.  I imagine that many a year will pass before we shall see such another.  Our glorious Spain is falling into decay, declining, dying.”

“ORBAJOSA, December 23.

“The young man who will present to you a letter of introduction from me is the nephew of our dear Penitentiary, a lawyer with some literary ability.  Carefully educated by his uncle, he has very sensible ideas.  How regrettable it would be if he should become corrupted in that sink of philosophy and incredulity!  He is upright, industrious, and a good Catholic, for which reasons I believe that in an office like yours he will rise to distinction in his profession.  Perhaps his ambition may lead him (for he has ambition, too) into the political arena, and I think he would not be a bad acquisition to the cause of order and tradition, now that the majority of our young men have become perverted and have joined the ranks of the turbulent and the vicious.  He is accompanied by his mother, a commonplace woman without any social polish, but who has an excellent heart, and who is truly pious.  Maternal affection takes in her the somewhat extravagant form of worldly ambition, and she declares that her son will one day be Minister.  It is quite possible that he may.

“Perfecta desires to be remembered to you.  I don’t know precisely what is the matter with her; but the fact is, she gives us great uneasiness.  She has lost her appetite to an alarming degree, and, unless I am greatly mistaken in my opinion of her case, she shows the first symptoms of jaundice.  The house is very sad without Rosarito, who brightened it with her smiles and her angelic goodness.  A black cloud seems to rest now over us all.  Poor Perfecta speaks frequently of this cloud, which is growing blacker and blacker, while she becomes every day more yellow.  The poor mother finds consolation for her grief in religion and in devotional exercises, which each day she practises with a more exemplary and edifying piety.  She passes almost the whole of the day in church, and she spends her large income in novenas and in splendid religious ceremonies.  Thanks to her, religious worship has recovered in Orbajosa its former splendor.  This is some consolation in the midst of the decay and dissolution of our nationality.