ly Water. Without ceasing to admire these historic
bits of knowledge, Ulysses, nevertheless, used to receive them with a
certain ingratitude.

"My godfather could explain things to me in a better way.... My
godfather knows more."

When surveying the chapel of Santa Barbara during the Mass, he used
always to turn his eyes away from the funeral chest. The thought of
those bones turned to dust filled him with repugnance. That Dona
Constanza did not exist for him. The one who was interesting to him was
the other one, a little further on who was painted in a small picture.
Dona Constanza had had leprosy--an infirmity that in those days was not
permitted to Empresses--so Santa Barbara had miraculously cured her
devotee. In order to perpetuate this event, Santa Barbara was depicted
on the canvas as a lady dressed in a full skirt and slashed sleeves,
and at her feet was the _basilisa_ in the dress of a Valencian peasant
arrayed in great jewels. In vain Don Esteban affirmed that this picture
had been painted centuries after the death of the Empress. The child's
imagination vaulted disdainfully over such difficulties. Just as she
appeared on the canvas, Dona Constanza must have been--flaxen-haired,
with great black eyes, exceedingly handsome and a little inclined to
stoutness, perhaps, as was becoming to a woman accustomed to trailing
robes of state and who had consented to disguise herself as a
country-woman, merely because of her piety.

The image of the Empress obsessed his childish thoughts. At night when
he felt afraid in bed, impressed by the enormousness of the room that
served as his sleeping chamber, it was enough for him to recall the
sovereign of Byzantium to make him forget immediately his disquietude
and the thousand queer noises in the old building. "Dona Constanza!"...
And he would go off to sleep cuddling the pillow, as though it were the
head of the _basilisa_, his closed eyes continuing to see the black
eyes of the regal Senora, maternal and affectionate.

All womankind, on coming near him, took on something of that other one
who had been sleeping for the past six centuries in the upper part of
the chapel wall. When his mother, sweet and pallid Dona Cristina, would
stop her fancy work for an instant to give him a kiss, he always saw in
her smile something of the Empress. When Visenteta, a maid from the
country--a brunette, with eyes like blackberries, rosy-cheeked and
soft-skinned--would help him to undress,