However he could not but feel a respect for the modesty of Augusti, (based as it was upon a noble self-reliance,) which never let him say a word about himself, as well as for the knowledge he had gained by travel. Cesara,--by the way I shall continue through this Cycle to write it with a C, agreeably to the Spanish orthography; but in and after the 4th, since I am not used to that letter in my orthography, and cannot be forever misrepresenting myself through a long book, it will be written with a Z,--Cesara could not hear enough from the Lector about his father. He related to him the last act of the Knight in Rome, but with an irreligious coldness which produced in the youth a chill of a different kind. Don Gaspard, namely, had laid a wager with a German Nuncius, picture against picture, that he would take a certain German (Augusti would not name him), whose life was only one prolonged, moral filth-month in the princely stable of Epicurus, and in two days, without seeing him, would convert him for as long a time as the Nuncio should desire. The latter accepted the wager, but caused the German to be secretly watched. After two days the German locked himself up, became devout, pale, still, bed-ridden, and in conduct came near to a true Christian. The Nuncio watched the mischief for a week, then demanded the sudden retransformation, or the Circe's wand, which should bring back again the beastly shape. The Knight touched the German with the wand, and the Epicurean swine stood there perfectly sound and well. I know not which is the more inexplicable, the miracle, or the cold-bloodedness of the thing. But the Lector could not say with what menstrua Gaspard forced these rapid solutions and evaporations and precipitations.