“It seems that he is no engineer at all,” added an olive-planter, whose plantations were mortgaged for double their value.  “But it is as you say:  those starvelings from Madrid think they are justified in deceiving poor provincials, and as they believe that here we all wear tails—­”

“It is plain to be seen that he is penniless—­”

“Well, half-jest and the whole earnest, he told us last night that we were lazy barbarians.”

“That we spent our time sunning ourselves, like the Bedouins.”

“That we lived with the imagination.”

“That’s it; that we lived with the imagination.”

“And that this city was precisely like a city in Morocco.”

“Well! one has no patience to listen to those things.  Where else could he see (unless it might be in Paris) a street like the Calle del Condestable, that can show seven houses in a row, all of them magnificent, from Dona Perfecta’s house to that of Nicolasita Hernandez?  Does that fellow suppose that one has never seen any thing, or has never been in Paris?”

“He also said, with a great deal of delicacy, that Orbajosa was a city of beggars; and he gave us to understand that in his opinion we live in the meanest way here without being ourselves aware of it.”

“What insolence!  If he ever says that to me, there will be a scene in the Casino,” exclaimed the collector of taxes.  “Why didn’t they tell him how many arrobas of oil Orbajosa produced last year?  Doesn’t the fool know that in good years Orbajosa produces wheat enough to supply all Spain, and even all Europe, with bread?  It is true that the crops have been bad for several years past, but that is not the rule.  And the crop of garlic!  I wager the gentleman doesn’t know that the garlic of Orbajosa made the gentleman of the jury in the Exposition of London stare!”

These and other conversations of a similar kind were to be heard in the rooms of the Casino in those days.  Notwithstanding this boastful talk, so common in small towns, which, for the very reason that they are small, are generally arrogant, Rey was not without finding sincere friends among the members of the learned corporation, for they were not all gossips, nor were there wanting among them persons of good sense.  But our hero had the misfortune—­if misfortune it can be called—­to be unusually frank in the manifestation of his feelings, and this awakened some antipathy toward him.

Days passed.  In addition to the natural disgust which the social customs of the episcopal city produced in him, various causes, all of them disagreeable, began to develop in his mind a profound sadness, chief among these causes being the crowd of litigants that swarmed about him like voracious ants.  Many others of the neighboring landowners besides Uncle Licurgo claimed damages from him, or asked him to render accounts for lands managed by his grandfather.  A claim was also brought against him because of a certain