“What art thou, then?” said the viceroy.
“A Christian woman,” replied the youth.
“A woman and a Christian, in such a dress and in such circumstances! It is more marvellous than credible,” said the viceroy.
“Suspend the execution of the sentence,” said the youth; “your vengeance will not lose much by waiting while I tell you the story of my life.”
What heart could be so hard as not to be softened by these words, at any rate so far as to listen to what the unhappy youth had to say? The general bade him say what he pleased, but not to expect pardon for his flagrant offence. With this permission the youth began in these words.
“Born of Morisco parents, I am of that nation, more unhappy than wise, upon which of late a sea of woes has poured down. In the course of our misfortune I was carried to Barbary by two uncles of mine, for it was in vain that I declared I was a Christian, as in fact I am, and not a mere pretended one, or outwardly, but a true Catholic Christian. It availed me nothing with those charged with our sad expatriation to protest this, nor would my uncles believe it; on the contrary, they treated it as an untruth and a subterfuge set up to enable me to remain behind in the land of my birth; and so, more by force than of my own will, they took me with them. I had a Christian mother, and a father who was a man of sound sense and a Christian too; I imbibed the Catholic faith with my mother’s milk, I was well brought up, and neither in word nor in deed did I, I think, show any sign of being a Morisco. To accompany these virtues, for such I hold them, my beauty, if I possess any, grew with my growth; and great as was the seclusion in which I lived it was not so great but that a young gentleman, Don Gaspar Gregorio by name, eldest son of a gentleman who is lord of a village near ours, contrived to find opportunities of seeing me. How he saw me, how we met, how his heart