position; but neither was convinced.

Then the landlady advised them to peer into her mirror. She--as she
assured them--had descended from the heights of the Comandancia (her
husband had been a commander of the carbineers) to the wretchedness of
running a boarding-house, yet she was resigned, and her lips curled in
a stoic smile.

Dona Casiana knew the meaning of resignation and her only solace in
this life was a few volumes of novels in serial form, two or three
feuilletons, and a murky liquid mysteriously concocted by her own
hands out of sugared water and alcohol.

This beverage she poured into a square, wide-mouthed flask, into which
she placed a thick stem of anis. She kept it in the closet of her
bedroom.

Some one who discovered the flask with its black twig of anis compared
it to those bottles in which fetuses and similar nasty objects are
preserved, and since that time, whenever the landlady appeared with
rosy cheeks, a thousand comments--not at all favourable to the
madame's abstinence--ran from lodger to lodger.

"Dona Casiana's tipsy from her fetus-brandy."

"The good lady drinks too much of that fetus."

"The fetus has gone to her head...."

Manuel took a friendly part in this witty merriment of the boarders.