At one moment there was a diversion--the crowd suddenly gaped, and there staggered onto the stage the whole crew of the schooner carrying a huge pair of scales: it was always on the point of being too much for them, and running suddenly away with them in another direction. There were quite a number of ladies in the crowd--old ones, they seemed to the children. Some were thin and dried up, like monkeys: but most were fat, and one was fatter than all of them and treated with the greatest respect (perhaps for her moustache). She was the wife of the Chief Magistrate--Señora del Illustrious Juzgado del Municipal de Santa Lucia, to give her her title. She had a rocking-chair of suitable strength and width, which was carried by a short squinting negro and set in the very middle of the scene, right in front of the platform. There she throned herself: and the negro stood behind her, holding a violet silk sunshade over her head. No one can doubt that she immediately became the most noticeable thing in the picture. She had a powerful bass voice, and when she uttered some jocundity (as she repeatedly did), every one heard it, however much they were chattering among themselves. The children, as was their custom, wormed their way without any excess of civility through the crowd and grouped themselves round her throne. The captain either did not know, or suddenly refused to know, a single word of Spanish: so the auctioneering devolved on the mate. The latter mounted the stage: and with a great assumption of competence began. But auctioneering is an art: it is as easy to write a sonnet in a foreign tongue as to conduct a successful auction. One must have at one’s command eloquence without a hitch: the faculty of kindling an audience, amusing them, castigating them, converting them, till they rattle out increments as a camp-meeting rattles out Amens: till they totally forget the worth (and even the nature) of the lot, and begin to take a real pride in a long run of bidding--as a champion does in a long break at billiards. This little Viennese had been to a good school, it is true: for he had once resided in Wales, where one sees auctioneering in its finest flower. In Welsh, or English, or even in his native tongue, he could have acquitted himself fairly well: but in Spanish, just that margin of power was lacking to him. The audience remained stern, cold, critical, bidding grudgingly. As if this language difficulty were not in itself enough, there sat that overpowering old dame on her throne, distracting with her jokes whatever vestige of attention he might otherwise have managed to arouse.