Then the wife, the man's true and only wife, powerless to cope with such a sorrow, fell senseless to the ground.
MARIQUITA THE BALD
A Tale After The Style of an Old Chronicle
BY JUAN EUGENIO HARTZENBUSCH
MARIQUITA THE BALD
IT is as sorry a matter to use the words of which one ignores the meaning as it is a blemish for a man of sense to speak of what he knows nothing about. I say this to those of you who may have the present story in your hands, however often you may have happened to have heard Mariquita the Bald mentioned, and I swear by my doublet that you shall soon know who Mariquita the Bald was, as well as I know who ate the Christmas turkey, setting aside the surmise that it certainly must have been a mouth.
I desire, therefore, to enlighten your ignorance of this subject, and beg to inform you that the said noted Maria, Mariquita being the diminutive of this name, was born in the District of Segovia, and in the town of Sant 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, and 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.