Blue Ribbon movement. "Charity begins at home" -and so, they well might argue, does temperance. Yet however admirable her intentions, graceless posterity has cut down its benefactress' name to marimorena, which it unblushingly uses as a vulgarer and stronger equivalent for riña and pendencia, or in the polite equivalent of English slang, the devil of a shindy.

By way of instancing a marimorena, I recur to the second volume of the entertaining work known as El Averiguador (The Investigator). "In this year (1483), upon the twenty-fifth of October, Juan Galindo, a mason by trade, had some words with Pedro Ortiz, of the same occupation, both of them. living in the street called Santa Inés. The quarrel ended in Galindo's stabbing Ortiz in the arm.

"The brothers, other relatives, and friends of Ortiz met that night, marched to Galindo's house, beat down the doors, and put him to a shocking death. His afflicted widow ran out with pitiful cries, which were taken up by everyone that was acquainted with herself and with her dead husband; and all together set upon the assassins.

"These latter stood upon their guard and began so bloody a fray that by the day following more than five hundred were engaged in it, murdering one another amid the impotence of the authorities, both civil and military.

"All day long the combat lasted, until towards nightfall they brought out the Host and bore it in procession, and a Franciscan friar, by preaching and exhorting, succeeded in inducing the rioters to lay down their weapons and disperse.

"Twenty-eight were killed, forty-two wounded, and eighteen of the survivors were imprisoned."

The familiar Scriptural comparison, ser más viejo que Sara (to be older than Sarah), and the similarity in Castilian between Sara (Sarah) and sarna (the itch or mange), occasioned the laughable discussion between Don Quixote and the goatherd.

Such are the refranes and their satellites. For the enlightenment of those who may desire to study them more fully, I may add that the collection of Iriarte alone consists of four-and-twenty thousand. Many, of course, are worthless, feeble, and jejune; or else their point is completely worn away; but their very variety lends them interest, and although they lack the affecting beauty of the cantares, they are the quaintest and not the least instructive branch of Spanish popular literature. This is admitted even by so erudite and fastidious a critic as Fray Luis de León. "If anyone," he says, "should argue that these (the refranes) are but sayings of the vulgar, I would answer that just as there is no man so wealthy that he can spend so much as a whole people put together-even though each of the people contribute but a little-so is it with wisdom: since no man, be he ever so shrewd, can match in shrewdness the entire body of the populace (provided these be free from excessive grossness), when once they commune together, and unite each man his own knowledge with that of his neighbour. For God has given them all the power of recognising truth, and so, in whatsoever light we consider the refranes, we must esteem them greatly."

The popular conundrums, or adivinanzas, are of

a lighter mould than the refranes. The refrán is didactic; the adivinanza entertaining. Of rhyming adivinanzas, which are the only ones I need consider in the present connexion, we possess examples in English, but not many. I doubt whether our own would number a couple of hundred; but we all remember how, when we were children, our mothers. and nurses, pinching our toes for us, cried, "This little pig went to market; this little pig stayed at home," and so forth; or how, folding their hands and suitably working their fingers, they taught us

"Here's the church and here's the steeple ;
Open the door, and here are the people;
Here's the parson walking upstairs,

And here he kneels and says his prayers."

These are adivinanzas in their embryo stage-that of pictographic representation, the only medium suited to baby intellects. As we grow older these playful images take the form of a riddle, or adivinanza proper. Then the jest may lie in some catch or subtlety of expression, as in the familiar

"As I was going to St. Ives

I met a man with seven wives;
Each wife had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits;

How many were going to St. Ives?"

Or else it may depend upon certain inherent qualities or similitudes, as in the doggerel ditty of the orange

"As I was crossing London Bridge.

I met a yellow boy;

I bit his arm, I sucked the blood,
And cried-—'

No, my attention is wandering. With apologies to the Ancient Mariner

"I bit him through, I sucked his blood,
And cast his skin away."

The foregoing are stock specimens of the British adivinanza. But we are also fortunate enough to possess a single example which is unsurpassed in any language; not humorous, but moving; not popular, but scholarly. It will at once be gathered that I allude to the adivinanza, attributed to Byron, on the letter H.

"'Twas in heaven pronounced-it was muttered in hell,
And Echo caught faintly the sound as it fell.
On the confines of earth 'twas permitted to rest,
And the depths of the ocean its presence confessed.
'Twill be found in the sphere when 'tis riven asunder,
Be seen in the lightning, and heard in the thunder;
'Twas allotted to man with his earliest breath,
Attends at his birth and awaits him in death,
Presides o'er his happiness, honour, and health,
Is the prop of his house, and the end of his wealth.
In the heaps of the miser 'tis hoarded with care,
But is sure to be lost on his prodigal heir.

It begins every hope, every wish it must bound,

With the husbandman toils, and with monarchs is crowned. Without it the soldier, the seaman, may roam,

But woe to the wretch who expels it from home.

In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found,
Nor e'en in the whirlwind of passion is drowned:
It will soften the heart, and, though deaf be the ear,
It will make it acutely and instantly hear.
Yet in shade let it rest like a delicate flower :
Ah! breathe on it softly-it dies in an hour!

Here is a common Spanish example :

Guardada en estrecha cárcel
Por soldados de marfil,
Está una roja culebra

Que es la madre del mentir.
"Guarded in a prison strait,

Ivory gaolers round her wait,
Venomous snake of sanguine hue,
Mother of all lies that brew."

Answer:-The tongue.

In the sixteenth century, Sebastián de Horozco, a witty licentiate of Toledo, composed the following:

¿Qué es la cosa sin sentido
Que concierta nuestras vidas,
Sin vivir:

Muévese sin ser movido,

Y hace cosas muy sentidas

Sin sentir.

Este nunca está dormido

Midiendo siempre medidas
Sin medir,

Y tiene el seso tan perdido,
Que el mismo se da heridas
Sin herir?

"Whose is a senseless shape that doth control,
Lifeless himself, men's lives; lacking a soul,
Seeth our souls suffer; moveth, yet is not moved
By human hands, nor by our woes oft proved:
Marching to meet immensurable space
With tireless tread, in long and sleepless race,
Mysterious fabric, fond and witless, ever

Stabbing himself, yet all his neighbours-never?"

Answer:-A clock.

This bears the stamp of gentle birth; but the