“’Ille horridus alter
     Desidia, latamque trahens inglorius alvum.’

“’Of a horrible and slothful figure, dragging along the ignoble weight of the belly,’ Senor Don Jose.”

“You do well to translate it for me,” said Pepe, “for I know very little Latin.”

“Oh, why should the men of the present day spend their time in studying things that are out of date?” said the canon ironically.  “Besides, only poor creatures like Virgil and Cicero and Livy wrote in Latin.  I, however, am of a different way of thinking; as witness my nephew, to whom I have taught that sublime language.  The rascal knows it better than I do.  The worst of it is, that with his modern reading he is forgetting it; and some fine day, without ever having suspected it, he will find out that he is an ignoramus.  For, Senor Don Jose, my nephew has taken to studying the newest books and the most extravagant theories, and it is Flammarion here and Flammarion there, and nothing will do him but that the stars are full of people.  Come, I fancy that you two are going to be very good friends.  Jacinto, beg this gentleman to teach you the higher mathematics, to instruct you concerning the German philosophers, and then you will be a man.”

The worthy ecclesiastic laughed at his own wit, while Jacinto, delighted to see the conversation turn on a theme so greatly to his taste, after excusing himself to Pepe Rey, suddenly hurled this question at him: 

“Tell me, Senor Don Jose, what do you think of Darwinism?”

Our hero smiled at this inopportune pedantry, and he felt almost tempted to encourage the young man to continue in this path of childish vanity; but, judging it more prudent to avoid intimacy, either with the nephew or the uncle, he answered simply: 

“I can think nothing at all about the doctrines of Darwin, for I know scarcely any thing about him.  My professional labors have not permitted me to devote much of my time to those studies.”

“Well,” said the canon, laughing, “it all reduces itself to this, that we are descended from monkeys.  If he had said that only in the case of certain people I know, he would have been right.”

“The theory of natural selection,” said Jacinto emphatically, “has, they say, a great many partisans in Germany.”

“I do not doubt it,” said the ecclesiastic.  “In Germany they would have no reason to be sorry if that theory were true, as far as Bismarck is concerned.”

Dona Perfecta and Senor Don Cayetano at this moment made their appearance.

“What a beautiful evening!” said the former.  “Well, nephew, are you getting terribly bored?”

“I am not bored in the least,” responded the young man.

“Don’t try to deny it.  Cayetano and I were speaking of that as we came along.  You are bored, and you are trying to hide it.  It is not every young man of the present day who would have the self-denial to spend his youth, like Jacinto, in a town where there are neither theatres, nor opera bouffe, nor dancers, nor philosophers, nor athenaeums, nor magazines, nor congresses, nor any other kind of diversions or entertainments.”