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 until at last it comes perfect from the mold. A bevel gear, as Don Juan calls it. Those are the English words for it: bevel gear. It is strange about this English, a very simple and easy language to speak. The word no means the very same thing that it does in Castilian."

"Simpleton!" said Magdalena laughing until her cheeks were red.

"A bevel gear," Sergeant Olivera repeated, thoughtfully. "But it is nothing new in mechanics, Don Geronimo?"

"Not at all; but new to the simple padres, applied for the first time in California. We have two buhrstones turned by the contrivance; I grant that it is a labor-saving machine, which is all this American yankee thinks of—saving human energy, the most plentiful and the cheapest thing in the world."

"That is not all that Don Juan has accomplished," Borromeo said with pride. "He has shown us how oxen are yoked in America, with the yoke resting on the necks close against the shoulders, in place of being tied to the horns, as we do it, as it has been done in Spain for ten thousand years."

"Oh, not so long, Borromeo," Magdalena asserted. "The world has not been created as long as that."

"Well, as long as it has been made, then," Borromeo insisted.

"I do not see the advantage of the method,"