e illuminations, bullfights, and tournaments. The
old woman remained in the house of her pretended grandchild, not
choosing to part from Preciosa. The news reached Madrid, and Don
Francisco de Carcamo learned that the gipsy bridegroom was his son, and
that Preciosa was the gitanilla he had seen in his house. Her beauty was
an excuse in his eyes for the levity of his son, whom he had supposed to
be lost, having ascertained that he had not gone to Flanders. Besides,
he was the more reconciled when he found what a good match Don Juan had
made with the daughter of so great and wealthy a cavalier as was Don
Fernando de Acevedo. He hastened his departure in order to see his
children, and within twenty days he was in Murcia. His arrival renewed
the general joy; the lives of the pair were related, and the poets of
that city, which numbers some very good ones, took it upon them to
celebrate the extraordinary event along with the incomparable beauty of
the gitanilla; and the licentiate Pozo wrote in such wise, that
Preciosa's fame will endure in his verses whilst the world lasts. I
forgot to mention that the enamoured damsel of the inn owned that the
charge of theft she had preferred against Andrew was not true, and
confessed her love and her crime, for which she was not visited with any
punishment, because the joyous occasion extinguished revenge and
resuscitated clemency.

THE GENEROUS LOVER.

"O lamentable ruins of the ill-fated Nicosia,[76] still moist with the
blood of your valorous and unfortunate defenders! Were you capable of
feeling, we might jointly bewail our disasters in this solitude, and
perhaps find some relief for our sorrows in mutually declaring them. A
hope may remain that your dismantled towers may rise again, though not
for so just a defence as that in which they fell; but I, unfortunate!
what good can I hope for in my wretched distress, even should I return
to my former state? Such is my hard fate, that in freedom I was without
happiness, and in captivity I have no hope of it."

[76] A city of Cyprus, taken from the Venetians by the Turks in 1570.

These words were uttered by a captive Christian as he gazed from an
eminence on the ruined walls of Nicosia; and thus he talked with them,
comparing his miseries with theirs, as if they could understand him,--a
common habit with the afflicted, who, carried away by their
imaginations, say and do things inconsistent with all sense and reason.
Meanwhile t