the excellent quality of the food, the easy and cordial manners of the people and the extraordinary beauty of the scenery.
{32}
“I cannot understand why our amiable friend, Doña Aurora, does not take the child to see his native place,” Señor de Febrero would say, stroking the cushion of his crutch.
“I am always intending to do so,” Señora Pardiñas would answer, “but it is one of those plans that something always happens to interfere with. The truth is, as you know, that up to the{33} present there has always been some difficulty or other in the way.”
{33}
“Say that you are very fond of your ease, mater amabilis,” her son would interpose. “If it had depended upon you, you would have been a tree that you might have taken root where you had happened to be planted.”
“Just as I take you to San Sebastián I might have taken you to Galicia, child, but it has not been possible to do so. Do you think I don’t often long myself to see my native place again? We who were born there—it is foolishness—but our dearest wish is to go back to the old spot, and our love for it never changes.”
“And we who were not born there love it too,” added Don Nicanor Candás, armed with his trumpet. “I would give my little finger now to spend a year in Marineda; I would rather go there than to Oviedo or to Gijón.
“But with me,” continued Señora{34} Pardiñas, “something always occurred to prevent me from carrying out my plan, as if the witches had interfered in the matter. Do you long to see your native place again, before you die? Well, wear yourself out with waiting until you are bent double with old age. You shall hear the causes of my never going back there”—and she would count them upon her fingers: “First, the difficulties in the way of doing so. You leave your family, your home, your possessions, to wander about the world, with a young child who is always delicate—from Oviedo to Saragossa, then, on account of the Regency, to Barcelona, then to the Supreme Court here. I was always saying to Pardiñas, ‘Resign your position, man, resign your position, and let us return to the old land and not leave our bones in a foreign soil. With what we have, we have more than enough to live, and our family is not so large as to be a burden to{35} us.’ But you know what my poor husband was, there is no need for me to tell you.”
{34}
{35}
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