Cebre, where they will take the diligence. The path grows wilder, the woods close in more thickly, a cross shows where a man has been killed, there is no sound but that of the woodcutters among the chestnuts. The Marqués, keenly alert, sees the glint of a gun’s barrel in the brushwood pointing at the chaplain, who is held to be the instigator of this rebellion. It is Primitivo “out shooting.” The book is a gloomy picture of a rich country ruined by mismanagement, underhand dealing, and ignorance. The Marqués de Ulloa’s agent has the peasants so completely in his power that he is able to turn the scale of an election. He began by methodically robbing his master in the administration of his estate, and the money so obtained he lends to the peasants, who are driven to borrow that they may be able to continue to work their land. Primitivo charges an interest of eight per cent. (per month), and in years of famine he raises the interest. The country and its inhabitants are described with a master-hand. Don Ramón del Valle-Inclán is one of the new school of Spanish novelists, and properly belongs to the twentieth century. He is above all things a stylist. In his _sutiles prosas_ there is an exquisite restraint, with here and there a tinge of archaism and a haunting music of soft languid cadences. He loves the rare, the delicate, the costly, and his art is to write of luxury in sober phrases, instinct with sadness and the magic of regret. It is a style of silk and cut crystal, as of silver-work or polished ivory handled by thin ascetic fingers. In his four “Sonatas” (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) we have the memoirs of the Marqués de Bradomín, the recollections of his former loves. The scene of “Sonata de Primavera” is an Italian palazzo with the lilacs in flower along its terraces and roses filling the garden between the cypresses, while the scene of “Sonata de Estío” is Mexico in all the luxurious growth of its summer vegetation. In the “Sonata de Invierno” the scene is the Carlist Court at Estella and the setting is more gloomy. The Marquis loses an arm in the service of King Charles VII., and from the window of his sick-room at Villareal de Navarra looks out on a road lined with leafless poplars and mountains flecked with snow. But these novels do not equal “Sonata de Otoño,” the scene of which is in Señor Valle-Inclán’s native Galicia. Two lines of Verlaine in some way describe the novel:-- “Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé Deux spectres ont évoqué le passé.”