Her
great merit is a gift for story-telling, having, I verily believe,
as many stories at her command, as the inexhaustible Scheherezade of
the thousand and one nights. Some of these I have heard her relate
in the evening tertulias of Dame Antonia, at which she is occasionally
a humble attendant.
That there must be some fairy gift about this mysterious little
old woman, would appear from her extraordinary luck, since,
notwithstanding her being very little, very ugly, and very poor, she
has had, according to her own account, five husbands and a half,
reckoning as a half one a young dragoon, who died during courtship.
A rival personage to this little fairy queen is a portly old fellow
with a bottle-nose, who goes about in a rusty garb with a cocked hat
of oil-skin and a red cockade. He is one of the legitimate sons of the
Alhambra, and has lived here all his life, filling various offices,
such as deputy alguazil, sexton of the parochial church, and marker of
a fives-court established at the foot of one of the towers. He is as
poor as a rat, but as proud as he is ragged, boasting of his descent
from the illustrious house of Aguilar, from which sprang Gonzalvo of
Cordova, the grand captain. Nay, he actually bears the name of
Alonzo de Aguilar, so renowned in the history of the conquest;
though the graceless wags of the fortress have given him the title
of el padre santo, or the holy father, the usual appellation of the
Pope, which I had thought too sacred in the eyes of true Catholics
to be thus ludicrously applied.
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