Heath's Modern Language Series       

SPANISH
SHORT STORIES

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND
VOCABULARY

BY

ELIJAH CLARENCE HILLS, Ph.D. Litt.D.
Professor of Romance Languages in Colorado College

AND

LOUISE REINHARDT, A.M.

Instructor of Modern Languages in the Colorado Springs High School

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
BOSTON     NEW YORK     CHICAGO

Copyright, 1910,
By D. C. Heath & Co.

PREFACE

These Spanish Short Stories are, for the most part, realistic picturesof the manners and customs of modern Spain, written by masters ofSpanish prose. All were written in the second half of the nineteenthcentury or in the first decade of the twentieth,—except the story byLarra, which was written about seventy-five years ago. And all describerecent conditions,—except the tale, partly historical and partlylegendary, by Bécquer, which goes back to the invasion of Spain by theFrench under Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century; thestory by Larra, which, however, is nearly as true of Castile to-day asit was when written; and Trueba's story, which is partly legendary,partly symbolic, and partly realistic. The stories by Bécquer and PérezGaldós contain incidents that are supernatural, and those by FernánCaballero and Alarcón have romantic settings that are highly improbable;but all the stories are, in the main, true to the every-day life ofcontemporary Spain.

The Spanish stories in this collection have been arranged, so far aspossible, in the order of difficulty; but some instructors willdoubtless prefer to read them in chronological order, or, better still,in an order determined by the "school", or literary affiliations, ofeach author. This latter arrangement is difficult to make, and it mustbe, at the best, somewhat arbitrary. But to those who wish to study inthese stories the growth of contemporary Spanish fiction, it issuggested that the authors be taken up in the order in which they aregiven in the Introduction.

To the stories by Spanish authors have been added two bySpanish-American writers,—the one a native of Costa Rica, the other ofChile. These stories are excellent and well worth reading. For a fullerstatement regarding them, see the last pages of the Introduction.

The texts have been taken from standard editions (see the first note toeach story). The integrity of the texts has been scrupulously preserved,with only the two following changes: (1) the orthography has been madeto conform to that of the latest editions of the Dictionar