ew strength. But the
Manila Antaeus found himself a small and insignificant person at the
capital. There he was nobody, and he missed his beloved adjectives. He
did not mingle with the upper set, and his lack of education prevented
him from amounting to much in the academies and scientific centers,
while his backwardness and his parish-house politics drove him from
the clubs disgusted, vexed, seeing nothing clearly but that there
they were forever borrowing money and gambling heavily. He missed the
submissive servants of Manila, who endured all his peevishness, and
who now seemed to be far preferable; when a winter kept him between
a fireplace and an attack of pneumonia, he sighed for the Manila
winter during which a single quilt is sufficient, while in summer he
missed the easy-chair and the boy to fan him. In short, in Madrid he
was only one among many, and in spite of his diamonds he was once
taken for a rustic who did not know how to comport himself and at
another time for an _Indiano_. His scruples were scoffed at, and he
was shamelessly flouted by some borrowers whom he offended. Disgusted
with the conservatives, who took no great notice of his advice, as well
as with the sponges who rifled his pockets, he declared himself to be
of the liberal party and returned within a year to the Philippines,
if not sound in his liver, yet completely changed in his beliefs.

The eleven months spent at the capital among cafe politicians, nearly
all retired half-pay office-holders, the various speeches caught here
and there, this or that article of the opposition, all the political
life that permeates the air, from the barber-shop where amid the
scissors-clips the Figaro announces his program to the banquets
where in harmonious periods and telling phrases the different
shades of political opinion, the divergences and disagreements,
are adjusted--all these things awoke in him the farther he got from
Europe, like the life-giving sap within the sown seed prevented from
bursting out by the thick husk, in such a way that when he reached
Manila he believed that he was going to regenerate it and actually
had the holiest plans and the purest ideals.

During the first months after his return he was continually talking
about the capital, about his good friends, about Minister So-and-So,
ex-Minister Such-a-One, the delegate C., the author B., and there was
not a political event, a court scandal, of which he was not informed
to the last de