A RURAL TALE.
Gaffer Buscabeatas was already beginning to stoop at the time when the events occurred which I am going to relate; for he was now sixty years old, and of these sixty years he had spent forty cultivating a garden bordering on the shore of La Costilla.
In the year in question he had cultivated in this garden some wonderful pumpkins, as large as the ornamental globes on the breastwork of some massive bridge, that at the time of our story were beginning to turn yellow, inside and out, which is the same as saying that it was the middle of June. Old Buscabeatas knew by heart the particular form and the stage of maturity at which it had arrived of every one of these pumpkins, to each of which he had given a name, and especially of the forty largest and finest specimens, which were already crying out, “Cook me!” and he spent the days contemplating them affectionately, and saying in melancholy accents—
“Soon we shall have to part!”
At last, one evening, he made up his mind to the sacrifice, and marking out the best fruits of those beloved vines which had cost him so many anxieties, he pronounced the dreadful sentence—
“To-morrow,” he said, “I shall cut from their stalks these forty pumpkins and take them to the market at Cadiz. Happy the man who shall eat of them!”
And he returned to his home with slow step and spent the night in such anguish as a father may be supposed to feel on the eve of his daughter’s wedding-day.
“What a pity to have to part from my dear pumpkins!” he would sigh from time to time in his restless vigil. But presently he would reason with himself and end his reflections by saying, “And what else can I do but sell them? That is what I have raised them for. The least they will bring me is fifteen dollars!”
Judge, then, what was his consternation, what his rage and despair, on going into the garden on the following morning, to find that during the night he had been robbed of his forty pumpkins! Not to weary the reader, I will only say that his emotion, like that of Shakespeare’s Jew, so admirably represented, it is said, by the actor Kemble, reached the sublimity of tragedy as he frantically cried—
“Oh, if I could but find the thief! If I could but find the thief!”