CHAPTER XXXIX.

WHEREIN THE CAPTIVE RELATES HIS LIFE AND ADVENTURES My family had its origin in a village in the mountains of Leon, and nature had been kinder and more generous to it than fortune; though in the general poverty of those communities my father passed for being even a rich man; and he would have been so in reality had he been as clever in preserving his property as he was in spending it. This tendency of his to be liberal and profuse he had acquired from having been a soldier in his youth, for the soldier’s life is a …