s in Valencia, praising their virtues to the skies, and
reselling them as thoroughbreds. And no sale on the instalment plan!
Cash down! The horses did not belong to him--as he vowed with his hand
pressed solemnly to his bosom--and their owners wished to realize on
their value at once. The best he could do in the circumstances prompted
by his greatness of heart, which always overflowed at the sight of
poverty was to borrow money for the purchase from a friend of his.

The peasant in his desperate need would fall into the snare, and carry
off the horse after signing all kinds of notes and mortgages to cover
the loan of money he had not seen! For the don Jaime who spoke for the
unknown party in the deal transferred the cash to the same don Jaime who
spoke for the owner of the horse. Result: the rustic bought an animal,
without chaffering, at double its value, having in addition borrowed a
lot of money at cut-throat interest. In every turn-over of this sort don
Jaime doubled his principal. New straits inevitably developed for the
dupe; the interest kept piling up; hence new concessions, still more
ruinous than the first, that don Jaime might be placated and give the
purchaser a month's reprieve.

Every Wednesday, which was market-day in Alcira and brought a great
crowd of orchard-folk to town, the street where don Jaime lived was the
busiest in the city. People came in droves to ask for renewal of their
notes, each leaving a tip of several _pesetas_ usually, not to be
counted against the debt itself. Others, humbly, timidly, as if they had
come to rob the grasping Shylock, would ask for loans; and the strange
thing about it, as the malicious noted, was that all these people, after
leaving everything they owned in don Jaime's hands, went off content,
their faces beaming with satisfaction, as if they had just been rescued
from a danger.

This was don Jaime's chief skill. He had the trick of making usury look
like kindness; he always spoke of _those fellows_, those hidden owners
of the money and the horses--heartless wretches who were "after him,"
holding him responsible for the short-comings of all their debtors. The
burdens he thus supposedly assumed won him a reputation as a
kind-hearted soul, and such confidence was the wily old demon able to
instill in his victims that when mortgages were foreclosed on homes or
fields, many of the unfortunates despoiled, would say, resignedly:

"It's not his fault. What could the poor