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 man do if they forced him to
it? It's those _other fellows_ who are sucking the blood of us poor
folks."

And so, quietly, leisurely, tranquilly, don Jaime got possession of a
field here, then another there, then a third between the two; and in a
few years he had rounded out a beautiful orchard of orange-trees with
virtually no expenditure of capital at all. Thus his property went on
increasing, and, with his radiant smile, his spectacles on his forehead
and his paunch growing fatter and fatter, he could be seen surrounded by
new victims, addressing them with the affectionate _tu_, patting them on
the back, and vowing that this weakness he had for the doing of favors
would some day bring him to dying like a dog in the gutter.

Thus he went on prospering. Nor was all the scoffing of city people of