professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any
further. The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers
practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an
hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said
for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their
lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in
the world since they got their appointments. All Spanish culture is at
second hand, purely on the surface, 'translated from the French,' and
even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of
those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books
they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human
thought is from the newspapers. The parents who are desirous of
securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking
a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely
know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the
full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here. The
universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you
only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself
for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become
a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor. These
children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other
countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the
title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more;
these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who
to-morrow may be legislators and ministers. Come, my good man, it is
enough to make one laugh!"

Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his
words. Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.

"This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing. The
number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is
incalculable. In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as
so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved,
supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all
can examine them. Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have
passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance--in fact,
all the styles of Europe--the ruins in the country are hidden and
disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the town