Next, the fat, greasy lawyer paraded all the glories of Spain, with their appropriate adjectives: the Cid, Columbus, Isabella the Catholic, the Great Captain, Hernán Cortés.... Then a couple of dozen orators spoke, and the meeting ended very late at night.
CASTRO DURO TODAY
Today Castro Duro has definitely abandoned her intentions of living, and return to order, as the weekly Conservative paper says; the fountains have dried, the school been closed, the little trees in Moncada Park have been pulled up. The people emigrate every year by hundreds. Today a mill shuts down, tomorrow a house falls in; but Castro Duro continues to live with her venerated traditions and her holy principles, not permitting outsiders devoid of religion and patriotism to disturb her existence, not spotting the most holy rights of the Church, our mother; enveloped in dust, in dirt, and in filth, asleep in the sun, in the midst of her grainless fields.
XXII. FINIS GLORIÆ MUNDI. FROM A SOCIETY COLUMN
To be in Castro Duro and not visit Don Cæsar Moncada’s house is a veritable crime of lèse-art. Señor Moncada, who is a most intelligent person, has gathered in his aristocratic residence a collection of precious things, old pictures, antiques, sculptures of the XV and XVI Centuries, badges of the Inquisition. Señor Moneada has made a conscientious study of the primitive Castilian painters, and is certainly the person most at home in that line.
His most beautiful wife, who is also a distinguished artist, has aided him in forming this collection, and they have both gone about by automobile through all the towns in this province and the neighbouring ones, collecting everything artistic they found.
At Don Cæsar’s house we had the pleasure of greeting the learned Franciscan Father Martin, to whom the population of Castro Duro owes so much.
At a halt in the conversation we asked Señor Moncada:
“And you, Don Cæsar, have no idea of going back into politics?”