Wherein the captive relates his life and adventures.*
'IN a certain town, in the mountains of Leon, my lineage had its beginning; to which nature was more kind and liberal than fortune; though amidst the penury of those parts my father passed for a rich man, and really would have been such, had he had the knack of saving, as he had of squandering his estate. This disposition of his to prodigality and profusion proceeded from his having been a soldier in his younger days; for the army is a school in which the niggardly become generous, and the generous prodigal: and if there are some soldiers misers, they are a kind of monsters but very rarely seen. My father exceeded the bounds of liberality, and bordered near upon being prodigal; a thing very inconvenient to married men, who have children to inherit their name and quality. My father had three, all sons, and of age to choose their way of life: and seeing, as he himself said, that he could not bridle his natural propensity, he resolved to deprive himself of the means that made him a prodigal and spendthrift, which was, to rid himself of his riches, without which Alexander himself could not be generous. Accordingly, one day, calling us all three into a room by ourselves, he spoke to us in this or the like manner:
'"My sons, to tell you that I love you, it is sufficient that I say you are my children; and to make you think that I do not love you, it is sufficient that I am not master enough of myself to forbear dissipating your inheritance. But, that from henceforth you may see, that I love you like a father, and have no mind to ruin you like a step-father, I design to do a thing by you, which I have had in my thoughts this good while, and weighed with mature deliberation. You are all now of an age to choose for yourselves a settlement in the world, or at least to pitch upon some way of life, which may be for your honour and profit when you are grown up. Now, what I have resolved upon is, to divide what I possess into four parts: three I will give to you, share and share alike, without making any difference; and the fourth I will reserve, to subsist upon for the remaining days of my life. But when each has the share that belongs to him in his own power, I would have him follow one of these ways I shall propose. We have a proverb here in Spain, in my opinion a very true one, as most prov-
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