Page:Stories by Foreign Authors (Spanish).djvu/19

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THE TALL WOMAN.
15

will allow me to say so, a man of the modern world. I have no superstition about me, and am as much of a Positivist as the best of them, although I include among the positive data of nature all the mysterious faculties and feelings of the soul. Well, then, apropos of supernatural, or extra-natural, phenomena, listen to what I have seen and heard, although I was not the real hero of the very strange story I am going to relate, and then tell me what explanation of an earthly, physical, or natural sort, however you may name it, can be given of so wonderful an occurrence.

"The case was as follows. But wait! Pour me out a drop, for the skin-bottle must have got cooled off by this time in that bubbling, crystal-line spring, located by Providence on this piny crest for the express purpose of cooling a botanist's wine."


II.

"Well, gentlemen, I do not know whether you ever heard of an engineer of the roads corps named Telesforo X——; he died in 1860."

"No; I haven't."

"But I have."

"So have I. He was a young fellow from Andalusia, with a black moustache; he was to