When I began to study medicine, I found that my aggressiveness had departed completely. One day after quarrelling with another student in the cloisters of San Carlos, I challenged him to fight. When we got out on the street, it struck me as foolish to goad him to hit me in the eye or else to land on my nose with his fist, and I slipped off and went home. I lost my morale as a bully then and there. Although I was a fighter from infancy, I was also something of a dreamer, and the two strains scarcely make a harmonious blend. Before I was grown, I saw Gisbert's Death of the Comuneros reproduced as a chromo. For a long, long while, I always seemed to see that picture hanging in all its variety of colour on the wall before me at night. For months and months after my vigil with the body of the man who had been garroted outside of Pamplona, I never entered a dark room but that his image rose up before me in all its gruesome details. I also passed through a period of disagreeable dreams. Some time would elapse after I awoke before I was able to tell where I was, and I was frightened by it. SARASATE It was my opinion then, and still is, that a fiesta at Pamplona is among the most vapid things in the world. There was a mixture of incomprehension and culture in Pamplona, that was truly ridiculous. The people would devote several days to going to bull fights, and then turn about, when evening came, and welcome Sarasate with Greek fire. A rude and fanatical populace forgot its orgy of blood to acclaim a violinist. And what a violinist! He was one of the most effeminate and grotesque individuals in the world. I can see him yet, strutting along with his long hair, his ample rear, and his shoes with their little quarter-heels, which gave him the appearance of a fat cook dressed up in men's clothes for Carnival. When Sarasate died he left a number of trinkets which had been presented to him during his artistic career--mostly match-boxes, cigarette cases, and the like--which the Town Council of Pamplona has assembled and now exhibits in glass cases, but which, in the public interest, should be promptly disposed of at auction. ROBINSON CRUSOE AND THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND During my life in Pamplona, my brother Ricardo imparted his enthusiasm for two stories to me. These were _Robinson Crusoe_ and Jules Verne's _The Mysterious Island_, or rather, I should say they were _The Mysterious Island_ and _Robinson Crusoe_, because we preferred Jules Verne's tale greatly to Defoe's. We would dream about desert islands, about manufacturing electric batteries in the fashion of the engineer Cyrus Harding, and as we were not very certain of finding any "Granite House" during the course of our adventures, Ricardo would paint and paint at plans and elevations of houses which we hoped to construct in its place in those far-off, savage lands. He also made pictures of ships which we took care should be rigged properly.