Page:Brazilian short stories.djvu/16

12 ness in the case: it is an honor to become one of the crowded phalanx of budget-devouring parasites who patiently digest the country; it is a good business to taste at the end of each month a fixed salary and to have, nicely prepared for the future, the soft bed of a pension.

Here we see the difference between the ominous medieval times and the super-excellency of the democracy of the present day.

Absolutism brutally seized the victims and without warning or "habeas-corpus," murdered them; democracy works with the cunning of a hypocrite, sets traps, sticks a slice of orange inside and treacherously waits for the famished bird to fall into the noose, of his own free will. It wants chance victims and does not choose. This is called art, artfully done.

The man having been appointed, at first does not perceive his misfortune. Only at the end of a month or two he begins to have his doubts; doubts that gradually become a certainty, a horrible certainty that he has been impaled on the hard back of the worst plug in the neighborhood, with five, six, seven leagues of torture before him to consume per day, with the mail-bag behind him on the horse's back. These leagues are the pricks of the instrument of torture. For ordinary mortals a league is a league; the measure of a distance beginning here and ending there. The traveler, having covered the distance, arrives and is satisfied. The leagues of the postman, hardly are they over, return again "da capo" as in music. Having gone over six (suppose the route to be one of six leagues), he sees