vivid. All were friends of Doña Sol, many even belonged to her family,

and he had come to look on these as relations.

They all ate and drank with that almost savage voracity usual at nocturnal feasts, where every one goes with the fullest intention of exceeding in everything, a gipsy band stationed at the further end of the room intoning their somewhat melancholy songs, varied by sprightly dance music, added to the general hilarity.

By midnight all were more or less tipsy, but Gallardo in his cups was sad and gloomy. Ay! for that other one ... for the real gold of her hair! The golden hair of these women was artificial, their skin was thick and coarse, hardened by cosmetics, and through all their perfumes his imagination detected an atmosphere of innate vulgarity. Ay! for that other one ... that other one.

Gallardo drank deeper and deeper, and the women who had quarrelled for a place by his side, finding him dull and unresponsive, now turned their backs with insulting taunts on his gloom. The guitarists scarcely played any longer, but, overcome with wine, bent drowsily over their instruments.

The torero was also nearly falling asleep on a bench, when one of his friends offered to give him a lift home in his carriage; he was obliged to leave early so as to be home before the old Countess, his mother, arose to hear Mass, as she did daily, at dawn.

The night wind did not disperse the torero's drunkenness. When his friend dropped him at the corner of his own street, Gallardo turned with unsteady steps towards his house. Close to the door he stopped, leaning against the wall with both hands, resting his head on his arms as though he could no longer endure the weight of his thoughts.

He had completely forgotten his friends, the supper at Eritana, and the painted strangers, who had begun by quarrelling for him and who had ended by insulting him. Some memory of the other one still floated through his mind, that always! ... but vaguely, and at last that, too, faded. Now his thoughts, by one of the capricious turns of drunkenness, were entirely filled by memories of the bull-ring.

He was the first Matador in the world. Olé! so his manager and his friends declared, and it was the truth. His enemies would see a fine sight when he returned to the Plaza. What had happened the other day was only an accident, a trick that bad luck had played him.

Proud of the overpowering strength that the excitement of wine had momentarily given him, he imagined all the Andalusian and Castillian bulls to be like feeble goats that he could overthrow with a single blow from his hand.

What had happened the other day was really nothing. Rubbish!... As El Nacional said, "From the best singer there sometimes escapes a cock-crow."

And this proverb, heard from the lips of many venerable patriarchs of his profession on days of disaster, inspired him with an irresistible desire to sing, to fill the silence of the street with his voice.

With his head still leaning on his arms, he began to croon a verse of his own composition, one of overweening praise of his own merit.

"I am Juaniyo Gallardo....

Who has more c ... c ... courage than God," and being unable to improvise more in his own honour, he repeated the same words again and again in a hoarse and monotonous voice, which disturbed the silence, and made an invisible dog at the end of the street bark.

It was the paternal inheritance springing up afresh in him; that singing mania which had always accompanied Señor Juan in his weekly outbreaks.

The door of the house opened, and Garabato pushed out his sleepy head, to have a look at the toper whose voice he thought he recognised.

"Ah! is that you?" said the espada, "wait a bit while I sing the last."

And he repeated several times the incomplete ditty in honour of his own bravery, till at last he made up his mind to go into the house.

He felt no desire to go to bed. Guessing his condition he put off the time when he would have to go up to his own room, where Carmen would probably be awake and waiting for him.

"Go to sleep, Garabato; I have a great many things to do."

He did not know what they were, but he was attracted by the look of his office, with its decoration of life-like portraits, frontals won from bulls, and placards proclaiming his fame.

When the electric light was turned on and the servant moved away, Gallardo stood swaying unsteadily on his legs in the middle of the room, casting admiring glances over the walls, as though he were contemplating for the first time this museum of his triumphs.

"Very good. Very good, indeed!" he murmured. "That handsome fellow is me, and that other one too, all of them! And yet some people say of me.... Curse it all! I am the first man in the world. Don José says so, and he speaks the truth."

He threw his sombrero on to a divan, as if he were divesting himself of a glorious crown which oppressed his brow, and went staggering to lean with both hands on the writing bureau, fixing his eyes on the enormous bull's head which decorated the further end of the office.

"Hola! Good night, my fine fellow!... What are you doing here?... Muu! Muu!"

He saluted the head with bellowings, imitating childishly the lowing of the bulls on their pastures and in the Plaza. He did not recognize it; he could not remember why the shaggy head with its threatening horns should be there. But by degrees the memory came back to him.

"I know, you rascal.... I remember how you made me rage that afternoon. The crowd whistled at me and pelted me with bottles ... they even insulted my poor mother, and you! ... you were so pleased!... How you did enjoy it! Eh, shameless one?"...

His drunken glance thought he saw the brightly varnished muzzle twitch, and the glass eyes flash with peals of concentrated laughter; he even thought that the horned head was nodding an acknowledgment to his question.

The drunken man up to now smiling and good humoured, suddenly felt his anger rise at the remembrance of that afternoon's disgrace. And was that evil beast still laughing at it?... Those bulls with perverse minds, so cunning and reflective, were the evil causes of a worthy man being insulted and turned into ridicule. Ay! how Gallardo hated them! What a glance of hatred was his as he fixed it on the glassy eyes of the horned head.

"Are you still laughing, you son of a dog? Curse you, rascal! Cursed be the dam that bore you, and the thief your master who grazed you on the pastures! Would to God he were in jail.... Are you still laughing? Still making grimaces at me?"

Impelled by his ungovernable rage, he leant over the desk, and stretching out his arm opened a drawer. Then he drew himself up erect, and raised one hand towards the head.

Pum! Pum ... two revolver shots.

In the twinkling of an eye one of the electric globes was smashed to fragments, and in the bull's forehead a round black hole appeared surrounded by singed hair.

N.B.--This anecdote is related as true of Frascuelo.

FOOTNOTES:

[96] Large platforms with life-size figures carved in wood and magnificently dressed, representing scenes from the life of Jesus--or the Virgin Mary, or the Apostles. Each parish sends two. The figures are ancient and often by eminent artists.

[97] Lit.--an arrow, a song of three verses sometimes improvised.

[98] Dark one.

[99] Ancient armour, from the waist to the knees.

[100] The Calle de las Sierpes is a broad paved street through which there is no vehicular traffic; it leads out of la Campana, which is the upper end of the long straggling Plaza de San Francisco.

[101] A class like the French-Auvergnat water-carriers.