Senor Licurgo either did not hear the young man’s words, or, hearing, he paid no attention to them.  When they had forded the river, which, turbid and impetuous, hurried on with impatient haste, as if fleeing from its own hands, the peasant pointed with outstretched arm to some barren and extensive fields that were to be seen on the left, and said: 

“Those are the Poplars of Bustamante.”

“My lands!” exclaimed the traveller joyfully, gazing at the melancholy fields illumined by the early morning light.  “For the first time, I see the patrimony which I inherited from my mother.  The poor woman used to praise this country so extravagantly, and tell me so many marvellous things about it when I was a child, that I thought that to be here was to be in heaven.  Fruits, flowers, game, large and small; mountains, lakes, rivers, romantic streams, pastoral hills, all were to be found in the Poplars of Bustamante; in this favored land, the best and most beautiful on the earth.  But what is to be said?  The people of this place live in their imaginations.  If I had been brought here in my youth, when I shared the ideas and the enthusiasm of my dear mother, I suppose that I, too, would have been enchanted with these bare hills, these arid or marshy plains, these dilapidated farmhouses, these rickety norias, whose buckets drip water enough to sprinkle half a dozen cabbages, this wretched and barren desolation that surrounds me.”

“It is the best land in the country,” said Senor Licurgo; “and for the chick-pea, there is no other like it.”

“I am delighted to hear it, for since they came into my possession these famous lands have never brought me a penny.”

The wise legislator of Sparta scratched his ear and gave a sigh.

“But I have been told,” continued the young man, “that some of the neighboring proprietors have put their ploughs in these estates of mine, and that, little by little, they are filching them from me.  Here there are neither landmarks nor boundaries, nor real ownership, Senor Licurgo.”

The peasant, after a pause, during which his subtle intellect seemed to be occupied in profound disquisitions, expressed himself as follows: 

“Uncle Paso Largo, whom, for his great foresight, we call the Philosopher, set his plough in the Poplars, above the hermitage, and bit by bit, he has gobbled up six fanegas.”

“What an incomparable school!” exclaimed the young man, smiling.  “I wager that he has not been the only—­philosopher?”

“It is a true saying that one should talk only about what one knows, and that if there is food in the dove-cote, doves won’t be wanting.  But you, Senor Don Jose, can apply to your own cause the saying that the eye of the master fattens the ox, and now that you are here, try and recover your property.”

“Perhaps that would not be so easy, Senor Licurgo,” returned the young man, just as they were entering a path bordered on either side by wheat-fields, whose luxuriance and early ripeness gladdened the eye.  “This field appears to be better cultivated.  I see that all is not dreariness and misery in the Poplars.”