he who was before sick is now well and takes an ineffable delight in the just appreciation of things.  Imagination, the terrible madwoman, who was the mistress of the house, has become the servant.  Look around you, Senor Penitentiary, and you will see the admirable aggregation of truths which has taken the place of fable.  The sky is not a vault; the stars are not little lamps; the moon is not a sportive huntress, but an opaque mass of stone; the sun is not a gayly adorned and vagabond charioteer but a fixed fire; Scylla and Charybdis are not nymphs but sunken rocks; the sirens are seals; and in the order of personages, Mercury is Manzanedo; Mars is a clean-shaven old man, the Count von Moltke; Nestor may be a gentleman in an overcoat, who is called M. Thiers; Orpheus is Verdi; Vulcan is Krupp; Apollo is any poet.  Do you wish more?  Well, then, Jupiter, a god who, if he were living now, would deserve to be put in jail, does not launch the thunderbolt, but the thunderbolt falls when electricity wills it.  There is no Parnassus; there is no Olympus; there is no Stygian lake; nor are there any other Elysian Fields than those of Paris.  There is no other descent to hell than the descents of Geology, and this traveller, every time he returns from it, declares that there are no damned souls in the centre of the earth.  There are no other ascents to heaven than those of Astronomy, and she, on her return, declares that she has not seen the six or seven circles of which Dante and the mystical dreamers of the Middle Ages speak.  She finds only stars and distances, lines, vast spaces, and nothing more.  There are now no false computations of the age of the earth, for paleontology and prehistoric research have counted the teeth of this skull in which we live and discovered the true age.  Fable, whether it be called paganism or Christian idealism, exists no longer, and imagination plays only a secondary part.  All the miracles possible are such as I work, whenever I desire to do so, in my laboratory, with my Bunsen pile, a conducting wire, and a magnetized needle.  There are now no other multiplications of loaves and fishes than those which Industry makes, with her moulds and her machines, and those of the printing press, which imitates Nature, taking from a single type millions of copies.  In short, my dear canon, orders have been given to put on the retired list all the absurdities, lies, illusions, dreams, sentimentalities, and prejudices which darken the understanding of man.  Let us rejoice at the fact.”

When Pepe finished speaking, a furtive smile played upon the canon’s lips and his eyes were extraordinarily animated.  Don Cayetano busied himself in giving various forms—­now rhomboidal, now prismatic—­to a little ball of bread.  But Dona Perfecta was pale and kept her eyes fixed on the canon with observant insistence.  Rosarito looked with amazement at her cousin.  The latter, bending toward her, whispered under his breath: 

“Don’t mind me, little cousin; I am talking all this nonsense only to enrage the canon.”