I desire, therefore, to enlighten your ignorance of this subject, and
beg to inform you that the said noted Maria (Mariquita is a diminutive
of Maria) was born in the District of Segovia, and in the town of San
Garcia, the which town is famed for the beauty of the maidens reared
within its walls, who for the most part have such gentle and lovely
faces that may I behold such around me at the hour of my death.
Maria's father was an honest farmer, by name Juan Lanas, a Christian
old man and much beloved, who had inherited no mean estate from his
forefathers, though with but little wit in his crown,--a lack which
was the cause of much calamity to both the father and the daughter,
for in the times to which we have attained, God forgive me if it is
not necessary to have more of the knave than of the fool in one's
composition.

Now it came to pass that Juan Lanas, for the castigation of his sins,
must needs commit himself to a lawsuit with one of his neighbors about
a vine stock which was worth about fifty _maravedis_; and Juan was in
the right, and the judges gave the verdict in his favor, so that he
won his case, excepting that the suit lasted no less than ten years
and the costs amounted to nothing less than fifty thousand
_maravedis_, not to speak of a disease of the eyes which, after all
was over, left him blind. When he found himself with diminished
property and without his eyesight, in sorrow and disgust he turned
into money such part of his patrimony as sufficed to rid him of the
hungry herd of scriveners and lawyers, and took his way to Toledo with
his daughter, who was already entering upon her sixteenth year, and
had matured into one of the most beautiful, graceful, and lovable
damsels to be found throughout all Castile and the kingdoms beyond.