Blasicho had a hard time of it to get work enough to earn the bread that his wife and his little ones must have from day to day, and he hated work, as all his neighbors did, and all his race do. If he had a wife with a cheerful temper, to cheer him as he beat his leather on his knee, perhaps it would have been better for him and his, for it does make work light and easy to have a good-natured woman near at hand, to say a pleasant word and hear even one’s complaints with a sympathetic smile. But the wife of Blasicho was neither fair to look upon nor gentle in her temper, and she led the poor cobbler a vexed and weary life of it. His lapstone was not harder than the heart of his spouse, and the blows that he gave it were more in number, but not more severe, than she rained upon him, when their words grew into quarrels that always ended in the thorough discomfiture of the man of the house. Her great sorrow was that she had not wealth: her sisters had found husbands who could give them the best of every thing, and as much as they required to make fine ladies of them, but she had married a cobbler too poor to live without work, and too lazy to work, and the only blessing they had in abundance was a flock of children that grew in stature and numbers every year, and demanded more and more to keep them alive. She dinned her woes into his ears, and his poor soul was worried to despair by the ceaseless pother of her querulous tongue. He wanted money. If California had been part of the known world in the day of Blasicho’s misery, his greed would have driven him to the mines in search of gold. But gold he must have, or his wife would worry him to death. He had heard that the Moors had left heaps of gold in the earth all around him, and if he had some rod to guide him to the sacred spot where the treasure was concealed, it would be the making of him for life, to dig it and carry it home to gladden the heart of his discontented wife, and stop the everlasting run of her complaining tongue. Day after day he walked around the hill of which the Alhambra in its glory and decay is still the crown, and he studied the projecting rocks and the graceful curves and gentle depressions, and the peculiar growth of the citron and pomegranate, to discover some signs of a place where it might be that in the olden time some Moorish miser, or in later time some Spanish pirate coming home from foreign pleasures, had buried his gold. His hope was suddenly kindled into certainty. One sunny morning he was taking his daily walk about the sacred hill, and passing through the deep cut on the eastern side, where far above his head the aqueduct with the waters of the river run into the Alhambra with its refreshing and ceaseless flow, he sat down to rest awhile and muse upon his hapless lot, and the hopeless search in which he was wasting his days. He looked up at the craggy side through which the red rock cropped, and on the scanty soil in which the almond shrubs were