THE MARKET OF ANCESTORS.
They hereupon entered a fairly wide street, littered with coffins, amongst which walked several sextons, while a number of grave-diggers were breaking into various graves. Don Cleofas said to his companion—
“What street is this, it is the oddest I have ever seen?”
“This is more worldly and of the times than any other,” replied the Limping Devil, “and the most useful. It is the old-clothes market of ancestors, where anybody in want of forefathers, his own not suiting him, or being somewhat shabby, comes to pick out the one he likes best for his money. Just look at that poor, deformed gentleman trying on a grandmother he badly wants, and the other, who has already chosen a father, putting on a grandfather as well, who’s much too big for him. That fellow lower down is exchanging his grandfather for another, offering a sum of money into the bargain, but can’t come to terms because the sexton, who is the dealer, would be a loser by it. The man over there has just turned his great-grandfather inside out and is patching him up with somebody else’s great-grandmother. Her another with a policeman to look for an ancestor of whom he has been robbed, and who is hanging up in the market. If you want an ancestor or two on credit, no your chance; one of the dealers is a friend of mine.”
“I could do with some money, but I’m not in want of ancestors,” replied the student. So they continued their adventures.
“The Limping Devil.” Velez de Guevara (1644).
“IT IS THE OLD-CLOTHES MARKET OF ANCESTORS.”
VISION OF THE LAST JUDGMENT.
Homer, we find, represents Jupiter as the author or inspirer of dreams, more especially the dreams of princes and governors, granting always that the subject of them be of a religious and important character. It is stated, moreover, as the opinion of the learned Propertius, “that good dreams are sent from above, have their meaning, and ought not to be slighted.” To give frankly my own idea upon this subject, I am inclined to his way of thinking, in particular as to the case of a certain dream I had the other night. As I was reading a sermon concerning the end of the world, it happened that I fell asleep over it, and pursuing the same line of thought, dreamed the following dream of the Last Judgment—a thing rarely admitted into the house of a poet, so much as in a dream. I was in this way reminded too of an observation in “Claudian,” “that all creatures dream at night of what they have heard and seen in the day; as the hound,” says Petronius Arbiter, “dreams of hunting the hare.”