It is a book that may be read in little more than an hour, yet it has many arresting pages. A few short sentences, words thrown here and there at random with concealed art, give a wonderfully clear picture of green, rainy Galicia, with its hills and streams. We see the hills and more hills veiled in mist, the flocks of white and black sheep, the mills, the white smoke rising from the houses among the fig-trees, the distant blue mountains tipped with the first snows, a flight of doves against green fields above the tower of a _Pazo_, a stony bridle-path with its bramble hedges and great pools of water at which oxen drink, the peasants arriving to pay their tribute of corn at the Palacio, the shepherds coming down from the hills wearing their capes of reeds. Women return singing from the fountain, an old man drives on his cows as they stop to graze, a half-witted woman gathers scented herbs and simples that have mickle grace to “give health to the soul and cure the ills of the herd.” And there is the Palacio de Bradomín, with its flight of wide granite steps; a path leads to it through the green, drenched countryside, and the autumn sun lights up its windows among tall chestnut-trees. A fountain trickles and birds sing in the old garden of myrtle, cedar, and cypress, still in late autumn brimmed with roses, though “the paths were covered with dry and yellow leaves that the wind swept with a slow rustling; the snails, motionless _como viejos paralíticos_, as old paralytics, were taking the sun on the seats of stone.” The passages of the Palacio are long and gloomy, and cold strikes through the large silent rooms, so that in all of them logs of wood burn brightly, stirred with tongs of “ancient bronze, elaborately worked.” The bare branches of the trees graze the windows of the library, where, among the parchment bindings, reigns a monastic peace, _un sueño canónico y doctoral_.