to build another tower if the present one falls down “in my time or in that of all the generations and heirs that may come after me”; he is to pay for all lawsuits arising from the clock in the village, or in the neighbourhood. When he tears up the paper, the villagers’ suspicion of some afterthought in his gift is irrefragably confirmed. Lawsuits are the passion of the Mountain. One has continued in Don Silvestre’s family for seven generations, and he himself, having through poverty to choose between remaining a bachelor all his life and giving up the lawsuit, chooses the former without wavering. The last straw in his friend’s patience is a lawsuit drawn up against him because, when he was out shooting, part of a wall of loose stones round a peasant’s fields crumbled down shortly after he happened to have fired at a bird. “Bocetos al temple” (1876), and “Tipos Trashumantes” (1877), show the same power of keen observation. Pereda, who treats the failings of the peasants with unsparing, but withal benevolent humour, becomes merciless and even cruel when dealing with the pretentiousness of the vulgar and the inanity of rich _désœuvrés_. It has been wittily said of him that “he reverses the apostolic precept: so far from suffering fools gladly, he gladly makes fools suffer.” Without going outside his province he found matter ready to his hand in the _veraneantes_, the _flâneurs_ from Madrid, who passed the hot months in Santander. Thus in “Tipos Trashumantes” he pillories the _sabio_, the learned man, who allows that Cervantes was not an entirely common man, but regrets that neither Cervantes nor Calderón possessed the “philosophy of æsthetics,” or who despises the inhabitants of Santander because they have not heard of Jeeéguel (Hegel); the _literato_ or journalist who, because a speaker in Cortes had rendered Dante popular by a quotation, murmurs, “_come corpo morto cade_” if he drops his stick or cigar; the barber who misses in Santander that indefinable “air” of Madrid;--in fact, a procession of quacks and knaves, and fools and snobs: perhaps the only “sympathetic” figure is that of the Barón de la Rescoldera, who “has never a good word nor a bad deed.” It is pleasant to turn back to village scenes in “Tipos y Paisajes” (forming a second part of “Escenas montañesas,” 1871). Here we find the enriched “Indian” (that is a _montañés_ who has returned to his country after making a fortune in South America); the schoolmaster, in a serviceable coat of black, who writes letters for the whole village, and shuts himself up in his house to get, if not drunk, at least very intoxicated; the peasant Blas, who, after inheriting thirty thousand dollars, is miserable, but feels that he must live _como un señor_ now that he is rich, and dismisses as a temptation to be resisted the wish to go as of old, with goad on shoulder, along the high-road by the side of his oxen; the practical, rough, kindly priest, Don Perfecto; Don Robustiano, an old-fashioned