Vide “El Ente Dislucidado,” por Fray Antonio de Fuentalapeña, Capuchin. Seccion 3, Subseccion 5, Instancia 8, Num. 644. As readers unversed in the Spanish language may wish to know the testimony of the worthy and discreet Capuchin friar, Antonio de Fuentalapeña, we subjoin a translation of it:— “The licentiate Ardevines (book ii., chap. 8) says that the said house fairies (or familiar spirits), or those of the air, cause the apparitions of armies and battles,—such as those which are related in tradition (and some persons even depose to the truth of them as eye-witnesses), of the town and castle of Marcuello, a fortress at the foot of the mountains of Aragon (at present uninhabitable, on account of the great and frightful noises heard in it), the place of retreat of Count Don Julian, the cause of the perdition of Spain. It is said that certain apparitions of soldiers are seen in the air, which the vulgar say are those of the courtiers and people who aided him.” [Illustration] [Illustration] THE LEGEND OF PELAYO. [Illustration] [THE “Legend of Pelayo,” a fragment of which was printed in “The Spirit of the Fair,” in 1864, and another, entitled “Pelayo and the Merchant’s Daughter,” in “The Knickerbocker,” in 1840, is now first published entire.—ED.] [Illustration] THE LEGEND OF PELAYO. CHAPTER I. Obscurity of the Ancient Chronicles.—The Loves of Doña Lucia and the Duke Favila.—Birth of Pelayo, and what happened thereupon; His Early Fortunes, and His Tutelage under the veteran Count Grafeses. It is the common lamentation of Spanish historians that, in the obscure and melancholy space of time which succeeded the perdition of their country, its history is a mere wilderness of dubious facts, wild exaggerations, and evident fables. Many learned men in cells and cloisters have passed their lives in the weary and fruitless task of attempting to correct incongruous events and reconcile absolute contradictions. The worthy Jesuit Pedro Abarca confesses that for more than forty years, during which he had been employed in theological controversies, he had never found any questions so obscure and inexplicable as those rising out of this portion of Spanish history; and that the only fruit of an indefatigable, prolix, and even prodigious study of the subject, was a melancholy and mortifying indecision.[56] [56] Abarca, _Anales de Aragon_. Ante regno, § 2. Let us console ourselves, therefore, in our attempts to thread this mazy labyrinth with the reflection that, if we occasionally err and become bewildered, we do but share the errors and perplexities of our graver and more laborious predecessors; and that, if we occasionally stray into the flowery by-ways of fanciful tradition, we are as likely to arrive at the truth as those who travel by more dry and dusty but not more authenticated paths.