l him.

Whenever Captain Tiago arrived in town, his debtors received him with
an orchestra, gave him a banquet, and loaded him down with gifts. If
a deer or a wild boar was caught he always had a quarter of it for
his own table; if any of his debtors found a beautiful horse, within
a half hour it would be in the Captain's stable. All of this is true,
but still when the Captain had his back turned they made fun of him
and referred to him as Sacristan Tiago.

The gobernadorcillo [4] was an unhappy fellow who never commanded but
always obeyed; he never attacked any one, but was always attacked;
he never ordered anybody, but everybody ordered him; and besides, he
had to take the responsibility for everything that they had commanded,
ordered or disposed. The position had cost him five thousand pesos
and many humiliations, but, considering the profits he made, the
price was very cheap.

San Diego was like Rome; not the Rome of the time of Romulus, when
he marked out the walls with a plough, nor when, later, he bathed
in his own blood and that of others and dictated laws to the world:
no, San Diego was like the Rome of contemporaneous history, with this
difference--instead of being a city of marble, monuments and coliseums,
it was a city of sauali [5] and cock-pits. The parochial priest of
San Diego corresponded to the Pope in the Vatican; the alferez [6]
of the Civil Guard to the King of Italy in the Quirinal, but both
in the same proportion as the sauali or native wood and the nipa
cock-pits corresponded to the monuments of marble and coliseums. And
in San Diego, as in Rome, there was continual trouble. Everybody
wanted to be the leading senor, and there was always some one else
in the way. Let us describe two of these ambitious citizens.

Friar Bernando Salvi was the young and silent Franciscan whom we
mentioned in a preceding chapter. He had even more of the customs
and manners of his brotherhood than had his predecessor, the violent
Father Damaso. He was slender, sickly, almost always pensive, and very
strict in the fulfillment of his religious duties as well as very
careful of his good name. A month after his arrival in the parish
almost all the inhabitants became brothers of the "Venerable Third
Order," to the great grief of its rival, "The Brotherhood of the Most
Sacred Rosary." His heart leaped with joy at seeing on every neck in
the town from four to five scapularies, a knotted cord around every
waist, and every