[Page 160.]—1.[{160-1}] el emperador, Napoleon Bonaparte.
[Page 161.]—1.[{161-1}] 5.º = quinto, the Fifth Regiment.
2.[{161-2}] Los guerreros ... pusieron = dicen que los guerreros del claustro pusieron.
[Page 163.]—1.[{163-1}] For the life and works of Pereda, see[ page xi], of the Introduction. The text of La leva is taken from the Obras completas de D. José M. de Pereda, Tomo V, Escenas Montañesas, Madrid, 1901. La leva consists of several more or less detached incidents. Some of these incidents, in whole or in part, have been selected for this volume, the selections amounting in all to two-thirds of the entire story. For the complete story, the reader is referred to Escenas Montañesas. La leva is a realistic description of the life of the fisher-folk of Santander in Northern Spain, and of the distress caused amongst these poor people by compulsory service in the Spanish navy.
It is written partly in dialect; but the dialect, for the most part, is not local, as most of the expressions occur in the speech of the lower classes wherever Spanish is spoken.
2.[{163-2}] que no hay ... resista, that is irresistible.
[Page 165.]—1.[{165-1}] poeta ... Mancha; Pereda believes that only an inhabitant of the interior provinces of Castile or la Mancha would be likely to idealize in poetic language the rough life of a seaman or a fisherman.
[Page 166.]—1.[{166-1}] ¿Qué se te pudre? what ails you?
2.[{166-2}] Salú = salud. Both final d and intervocalic d are often dropped by the common people throughout the entire Spanish-speaking world. Cf. usté (usted), quitao (quitado), arrastrao (arrastrado), na (nada), too (todo), lao (lado), salío (salido), sentío (sentido), etc.
3.[{166-3}] Note the common use of the augmentative suffix, -on, -ona, in this story: ingratona (from ingrata); chismosona (from chismosa), borrachona (from borracha), viciosona (from viciosa), flojón (from flojo), etc. These augmentatives are here also depreciatives.