groups, taking
up with the deputies, flattering the ministers, and offering his
opinions in regard to whatever question might arise, letting himself be
carried away by melancholy (perhaps by the longing for his wife's
company, his armchair, or his Shakspere), he would go and sit down alone
on some sofa, and there give himself up to his thoughts or his dreams,
and try to delude himself into the idea that he was fulfilling his duty.

He would look with distracted eyes at the throng of deputies,
journalists and politicians tagging at their heels, and their feverish
activity, their agitation, and their eagerness had not the slightest
power to inspire the lazy fellow with the noble desire of laboring for
his country, and contributing in some way to its happiness.

At times, not having anything to think about, he would amuse himself in
seeking for resemblances between the men whom he saw and those whom he
had known before. His attention was particularly attracted by a deputy,
a custom-house director, who bore the closest resemblance to a certain
fisherman of Rodillero, named Talin. He had known Talin under
particularly sad circumstances. One of his sons had died of measles, and
he had not a shilling in the house with which to bury him; the poor man
had to carry him in his arms to the cemetery, and dig the grave himself.
A few months afterward Talin was lost in a famous gale which has figured
in more than one novel. And how closely this deputy resembled Talin!
They were as like as two eggs.

There was another whose face was decorated with big scars and
cicatrices, and whose eyebrows and eyelashes had been lost by reason of
some secret malady which obliged him to go every year to Archena; this
man struck him as particularly like a poor miner whom he had known at
Langreo. The latter worked in the galleries of the mines, spending the
livelong day in a narrow hole which he himself had laboriously to
excavate. One day the gas took fire and burned his face and hands
horribly. After that he was obliged to beg.

When he was weary of these exercises of imagination, he would call
Merelo y Garcia, and make him sit by his side, and delight in hearing
him relate with characteristic vehemence all the gossip from behind the
scenes, if it is not irreverent to compare the lobbies of Congress with
the flies of a theatre.

Merelo was at that time the phoenix of Madrid _noticieros_ and the envy
of the other newspaper proprietors, who had mor