The inhabitants of Galicia have been held to be the Boeotians of Spain, yet the fact that in the political world many eminent persons are Gallegans seems to show that Galicia has been maligned. To Galicia, too, belong two gifted modern writers, the Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán and Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Señora Pardo Bazán belongs to the older group of Spanish novelists; born in 1851,[107] she published her two well-known novels of Galicia, “Los Pazos de Ulloa,” and “La Madre Naturaleza,” in 1886 and 1887, and “De mi tierra,” a book of scenes and essays of Galicia, in 1888. It is as a regional novelist that Señora Pardo Bazán has won her most glorious laurels. “Galicienne ella adore les choses de la Galice,” says M. Vézinet,[108] and he adds that she develops the same subjects as French naturalists, but avoids the licentiousness of which they are so fond. The multitude of her tasks and interests has necessarily hampered her art as a novelist. “She has unfortunately diffused her energies in all directions,” says Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly. “No one can succeed in everything--as a poet, a romancer, an essayist, a critic, a lecturer, and a politician. Yet the Condesa Pardo Bazán is all this, and more. We would gladly exchange all her miscellaneous writings for another novel like ‘Los Pazos de Ulloa.’”[109] “Los Pazos de Ulloa” is a novel impregnated with the atmosphere of Galicia. Los Pazos is a large country-house in a remote valley of maize and vines and chestnuts, reached on horseback through a desolate wolf-country, _país de lobos_. Its furniture is rickety, its window-frames have no glass, though it is not so ruinous as Los Pazos de Limioso some leagues away, which lacks even window-frames. The village priest of Ulloa has but two devotions, those of the _jarro_ and the _escopeta_, the wine-jar and the gun; the drinking of water and the use of soap he holds alike to be effeminate. The Marqués de Ulloa, too, frank, noble at heart, but cynical, often brutal, spends much of his time at village fairs, and shooting partridges in the maize or among pines and scented hill-plants. He is totally in the power of his servant Primitivo, who manages his estates. Primitivo, too, holds the peasants, as he says, in the palm of his hand. They are patient workers who, however, in the opinion of the Marqués de Ulloa, need a strong hand to control them--some one like Primitivo _que les dé ciento de ventaja en picardía_, that is, who will know two tricks to their one. When the Marqués disburdens himself to the new chaplain, Don Julián, in the wild neglected garden, on the subject of Primitivo, he becomes aware by a rustling in the undergrowth that Primitivo has been listening to the outburst. When, as a first step to freedom, he determines to leave Los Pazos on a visit to his uncle at Santiago de Compostella, Primitivo makes no open opposition, but the mare is unshod, the donkey has been mysteriously wounded. The Marqués and Julián determine to go on foot to