time when he was a student in the Colegio Nacional at Orizaba, Delgado always received the helpful encouragement of his old teacher, the head of that school, Silvestre Moreno Cora. It was due to this truly great man’s efforts that the Sociedad Sánchez Oropeza was founded in Orizaba, in the literary section of which Rafael Delgado was active. At this society he gave a series of brilliant Conversaciones and to its Bulletin he contributed both prose and verse. He has written Cuentos (Tales) of excellence, showing the influence of Daudet. More important, however, than his lyric poems and his stories, are Delgado’s novels, three in number, La Calandria, Angelina, Los parientes ricos (Rich Relations). In fiction he is a realist. He prefers to deal with the common people; he is ever a poet in form and spirit; his satire is never bitter; beauty in nature ever appeals strongly to him. Without being a servile imitator, he has been influenced by Daudet and the Goncourts. His plots are simple—almost nothing. In regard to this, he himself, in speaking of Los parientes ricos, says: “Plot does not enter much into my plan. It is true that it gives interest to a novel, but it usually distracts the mind from the truth. For me the novel is history, and thus does not always have the machinery and arrangement of the spectacular drama. In my judgment it ought to be the artistic copy of the truth; somewhat, that is, as history, a fine art. I have desired that Los parientes ricos should be something of that sort; an exact page from Mexican life.”
In Calandria, the story opens with the death of Guadalupe, an abandoned woman, poor and consumptive. The man of wealth, who betrayed her, has a lovely home and a beautiful daughter. Carmen, “the Calandria,” as she is nicknamed by those about her on account of her singing, the illegitimate daughter of Don Eduardo by Guadalupe, is left in poverty. An appeal, made in her behalf, by a priest to Don Eduardo fails to secure her full recognition and reception into his home, but leads to his arranging for her care in the tenement where she lives and where Guadalupe died. An old woman, Doña Pancha, who had been kind to her mother, receives the orphan into her home. Her son, Gabriel, an excellent