“‘Fairly and softly,’ exclaimed the soldier.  ’Let us get the coffer
     out entire, and then divide: 

“They accordingly went to work with might and main; but it was a difficult task; the chest was enormously heavy, and had been imbedded there for centuries.  While they were thus employed the good dominie drew on one side and made a vigorous onslaught on the basket, by way of exorcising the demon of hunger which was raging in his entrails.  In a little while a fat capon was devoured, and washed down by a deep potation of Val de penas; and, by way of grace after meat, he gave a kind-hearted kiss to the pet-lamb who waited on him.  It was quietly done in a corner, but the tell-tale walls babbled it forth as if in triumph.  Never was chaste salute more awful in its effects.  At the sound the soldier gave a great cry of despair; the coffer, which was half raised, fell back in its place and was locked once more.  Priest, student, and damsel found themselves outside of the tower, the wall of which closed with a thundering jar.  Alas! the good padre had broken his fast too soon!

     “When recovered from his surprise, the student would have reentered
     the tower, but learnt to his dismay that the damsel, in her fright,
     had let fall the seal of Solomon; it remained within the vault.

“In a word, the cathedral bell tolled midnight; the spell was renewed; the soldier was doomed to mount guard for another hundred years, and there he and the treasure remain to this day—­and all because the kind-hearted padre kissed his handmaid.  ’Ah, father! father!’ said the student, shaking his head ruefully, as they returned down the ravine, ’I fear there was less of the saint than the sinner in that kiss!’

“Thus ends the legend as far as it has been authenticated.  There is a tradition, however, that the student had brought off treasure enough in his pocket to set him up in the world; that he prospered in his affairs, that the worthy padre gave him the pet-lamb in marriage, by way of amends for the blunder in the vault; that the immaculate damsel proved a pattern for wives as she had been for handmaids, and bore her husband a numerous progeny; that the first was a wonder; it was born seven months after her marriage, and though a seven months’ boy, was the sturdiest of the flock.  The rest were all born in the ordinary course of time.

“The story of the enchanted soldier remains one of the popular traditions of Granada, though told in a variety of ways; the common people affirm that he still mounts guard on midsummer eve beside the gigantic stone pomegranate on the bridge of the Darro; but remains invisible excepting to such lucky mortal as may possess the seal of Solomon.”

These passages from the most characteristic of Irving’s books do not by any means exhaust his variety, but they afford a fair measure of his purely literary