Dolores, my landlady and mistress of the Sacristy, was an agreeable,
exceedingly energetic, exceedingly hard-working woman, who was a
pronounced conservative.
I have met few women as good as she. In spite of the fact that she soon
discovered that I was not at all religious, she did not hold it against
me, nor did I harbour any resentment against her.
I often read her the _Añalejo_, or church calendar, which is known
as the _Gallofa_, or beggars' mite, in the northern provinces, in
allusion to the ancient custom of making pilgrimages to Santiago, and I
cooked sugar wafers over the fire with her on the eve of feast days, at
which times her work was especially severe.
I realized in Cestona my childish ambitions of having a house of my own,
and a dog, which had lain in my mind ever since reading _Robinson
Crusoe_ and _The Mysterious Island_.
I also had an old horse named Juanillo, which I borrowed from a coachman
in San Sebastian, but I never liked horses.
The horse seems to me to be a militaristic, antipathetic animal. Neither
Robinson Crusoe nor Cyrus Harding rode horse-back.
I committed no blunders while I was a village doctor. I had already
grown prudent, and my sceptical temperament was a bar to any great
mistakes.
I first began to realize that I was a Basque in Cestona, and I recovered
my pride of race there, which I had lost.