seaman on the _Numancia_.
In these narratives he mentioned the admiral, Mendez Nunez, in every
other sentence,--"and don Casto says to me, says he"--as if the hero had
had him for his most intimate friend and right-hand man. What delighted
his audiences invariably, however, was his description of the actual
combat, with imitations of a broadside from his glorious frigate: _boom!
boo-oo-oo-oo--m!_

In addition _tio_ Mariano was one of the big men about town. He had been
a smuggler in the happy days when revenue agents, from Captain of the
Port to ordinary patrolman, had hands but never eyes. And even now, when
things were not so lax, he would take a passive share in some enterprise
of the sort. But his principal activity was doing charity--lending the
fishermen, or their wives, advances on their pay at fifty per cent a
month; and this had given him a grip on the throats of the poorest
elements along shore, so that he could deliver their vote bodily in
every election campaign. His nephews could hardly contain their pride
when they heard him calling mayors and sheriffs by their first names, or
saw him, even, going up to Valencia in his best clothes and a top hat,
as member of a committee of leading citizens, to wait on the Governor.

A grasping, heartless Shylock, _tio_ Mariano had a scent for loosening
his purse strings at the right moment. He knew the inside workings of
every home for miles around. The Rector and Tonet, who owed him nothing
but the hope they had of inheriting something when he died, thought him
the most respectable and kindly man in the whole village, though very
seldom had they been admitted to his pretty house on Queen street,
_Calle de la Reina_, where he lived alone with a good-looking
housekeeper, the only person in town who dared talk back to him, and was
intimate enough with his affairs even to know where he kept his "pile."

_Tio_ Mariano listened to the Rector with eyes half closed and a
vertical line knit between his eyebrows. "Be d---- d, be d---- d! Of
course! Not a bad idea at all, not at all!" That's the way he liked
people--with some gumption! And he seized the occasion to brag of his
own biography as a fool successful in getting rich, telling how he had
left the navy without a cent in his pocket, and, to get out of the rut
his father and grandfather had been in as fishermen, had started off on
the underground route to Gibraltar and Algiers, to do his bit toward
keeping business going a