“Perhaps Perfecta will not oppose your doing so,” said the savant, giving his attention to his notes and papers.  “I don’t want to take any responsibility in the matter.”

The engineer, seeing that he could obtain nothing from the good Polentinos, rose to retire.

“You are going to work,” he said, “and I will not trouble you any longer.”

“No, there is time enough.  See the amount of precious information that I collected to-day.  Listen:  ’In 1537 a native of Orbajosa, called Bartolome del Hoyo, went to Civita-Vecchia in one of the galleys of the Marquis of Castel Rodrigo.’  Another:  ’In the same year two brothers named Juan and Rodrigo Gonzalez del Arco embarked in one of the six ships which sailed from Maestricht on the 20th of February, and which encountered in the latitude of Calais an English vessel and the Flemish fleet commanded by Van Owen.’  That was truly an important exploit of our navy.  I have discovered that it was an Orbajosan, one Mateo Diaz Coronel, an ensign in the guards, who, in 1709, wrote and published in Valencia the ’Metrical Encomium, Funeral Chant, Lyrical Eulogy, Numerical Description, Glorious Sufferings, and Sorrowful Glories of the Queen of the Angels.’  I possess a most precious copy of this work, which is worth the mines of Peru.  Another Orbajosan was the author of that famous ‘Treatise on the Various Styles of Horsemanship’ which I showed you yesterday; and, in short, there is not a step I take in the labyrinth of unpublished history that I do not stumble against some illustrious compatriot.  It is my purpose to draw all these names out of the unjust obscurity and oblivion in which they have so long lain.  How pure a joy, dear Pepe, to restore all their lustre to the glories, epic and literary, of one’s native place!  And how could a man better employ the scant intellect with which Heaven has endowed him, the fortune which he has inherited, and the brief period of time on earth allowed to even the longest life.  Thanks to me it will be seen that Orbajosa is the illustrious cradle of Spanish genius.  But what do I say?  Is not its illustrious ancestry evident in the nobleness and high-mindedness of the present Urbs Augustan generation?  We know few places where all the virtues, unchoked by the malefic weeds of vice, grow more luxuriantly.  Here all is peace, mutual respect, Christian humility.  Charity is practised here as it was in Biblical times; here envy is unknown; here the criminal passions are unknown, and if you hear thieves and murderers spoken of, you may be sure that they are not the children of this noble soil; or, that if they are, they belong to the number of unhappy creatures perverted by the teachings of demagogues.  Here you will see the national character in all its purity—­upright, noble, incorruptible, pure, simple, patriarchal, hospitable, generous.  Therefore it is that I live so happy in this solitude far from the turmoil of cities where, alas! falsehood and vice reign.  Therefore it is