unmeasured severity, and is an echo of the fierce opinions of the arena itself.
"The bulls from Cieneguilla," the Muleta will say, for instance, "acquitted themselves well, but the picadors—will a merciful Providence spare us any more of their sort in the future! Our stock-breeders and managers are getting so they offer us for a picador the first country lout they fall in with along the highway—a shoemaker as likely as not, or any poor riffraff whatever. As for the banderilleros, except Ramon Lopez, 'El Chiquitin,' and Ramon Marquez, there was not one of them so much as worth his salt. We have a Tovalo, Heaven save the mark! who is not fit to banderillar a goat; a Cuco who but language fails us in his case—and a Pompeyo who, could all his blunders be solidified, must be buried out of sight under the multitude of them. . . . Now, as to the espadas, 'El Habanero' (the Havana boy), he was luckless with his first bull, doubly so with his second, and too wholly unlucky for anything with his third. A year ago the Habanero was one sort of man, and now he is quite another. Is this only the natural effect of his pygmy stature, his shaking hand? He simply—carves the bulls; and, ye gods, how he carves them! Once he stood firm upon his legs, but now he skips about like a jumping-jack. Before Heaven, Manolo, this is no way to treat your obligations to a long-suffering public as a killer of bulls. . . . The whole affair was not a bull-fight at all; it was an herradura"
The herradura, it will be called to mind, is the disorderly, confusing occasion on which the young cattle are first branded with their owner's mark.
Such remarks are more common than the opposite, and are addressed, as we see, to the foremost lights in the profession. These technical journals are no respecters of persons,
