The next of the tales is very different, and yet no less within the personal experience of Cervantes himself. It is called “The Generous Lover,” and is nearly the same in its incidents with an episode found in his own “Trato de Argel.” The scene is laid in Cyprus, two years after the capture of that island by the Turks in 1570; but here it is his own adventures in Algiers upon which he draws for the materials and coloring of what is Turkish in his story, and the vivacity of his descriptions shows how much of reality there is in both. The third story, “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” is again quite unlike any of the others. It is an account of two young vagabonds, not without ingenuity and spirit, who join at Seville, in 1569, one of those organized communities of robbers and beggars which often recur in the history of Spanish society and manners during the last three centuries. The realm of Monipodio, their chief, reminds us at once of Alsatia in Sir Walter Scott’s “Nigel,” and the resemblance is made still more obvious afterwards, when, in “The Colloquy of the Dogs,” we find the same Monipodio in secret league with the officers of justice. A single trait, however, will show with what fidelity Cervantes has copied from nature. The members of this confederacy, who lead the most dissolute and lawless lives, are yet represented as superstitious, and as having their images, their masses, and their contributions for pious charities, as if robbery were a settled and respectable vocation, a part of whose income was to be devoted to religious purposes in order to consecrate the remainder; a delusion which, in forms alternately ridiculous and revolting, has subsisted in Spain from very early times down to the present day.[137]