his lame leg, broken by jumping from a horse-car. The first quarter of an hour’s conversation was generally devoted to a discussion of the weather and the health of the company; there was not one of these worthy people who was not afflicted with some ailment or other.{16} Some of them, indeed, were full of ailments, so that neither their complaints nor the remedies they discussed were of merely abstract interest. There an account was kept of the fluctuations in the chronic catarrhs, the rheumatic pains, the flatulent attacks, and the heartburns of each one of the assemblage, and they discussed as solemnly as they had formerly discussed a judgment the virtues of salycilic acid or of pectoral lozenges.
{16}
The sanitary question being exhausted—for everything exhausts itself—they passed on, almost always following the lead of Señor Febrero, to treat of less agreeable matters. The amiable old man could not bear to hear all this talk of drugs, prescriptions, and potions. “Any one would suppose one had one foot in the grave,” he would say, smiling and showing his brilliant artificial teeth. The subject of the conversation was changed, but it{17} scarcely ever turned on questions of the day. Like a gavotte played by a grandmother on an antiquated harpsichord, the ritornello of souvenirs and reminiscences of the past resounded here. The conversation usually began somewhat as follows:
{17}
“Do you remember when I received my appointment to the Canary Islands during the ministry of Narvaez?”
Or:
“What times those were! At least ten years before the celebrated Fontanellas case. My eldest son was not yet born.”
Señor de Febrero interposed to restrain them in these sorrowful reminiscences of bygone days also, exclaiming with youthful vivacity:
“Why, that took place only yesterday, as one might say. In the life of a nation what is a paltry twenty-five or thirty years?”
“Yes, but in a man’s life—{18}—”
{18}
“Or in a man’s life either, if it comes to that. Forty or fifty I call the prime of life.”
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