Pablo De Segovia

Don Alonso resolved to send his son to a boarding-school; both to wean / him from his tender keeping at home, and at the same time to ease / himself of that care. He was informed there was a master of arts in / Segovia whose name was Cabra, that made it his business to breed up / gentlemen's sons; [8] thither he sent his, and me to wait on him. The / first Sunday after Lent we were brought into the house of famine, for it / is impossible to express the penury of the place. The master was a / skeleton, a mere shotten herring, or like a long slender cane, with a / little head upon it, and red haired; so that there needs no more to be / said to such as know the proverb, that "neither cat nor dog of that / colour is good. " His eyes were sunk into his head, as if he had looked / through a fruit bottle, or the deep windows in a linen draper's shop; / his nose turning up, and somewhat flat, for the bridge was almost / carried away with an inundation of a cold rheum, for he never had the / disease, because it costs money; his beard had lost its colour for fear / of his mouth, which being so near, seemed to threaten to eat it for mere / hunger; his teeth had many of them forsaken him for want of employment, / or else were banished for being idle livers; his neck as long as a / crane's, with the gullet sticking out so far, as if it had been / compelled by necessity to start out for sustenance; his arms withered; / his hands like a bundle of twigs, each of them, taken downwards, looking / like a fork or a pair of compasses; with long slender legs. He walked / leisurely, and whensoever he happened to move any thing faster his bones / rattled like a pair of snappers. His voice was weak and hollow; his / beard bushy and long, for he never trimmed to save charges, though he / pretended it was so odious to him to feel the barber's hands all over / his face that he would rather die than endure it. One of the boys cut / his hair.

In fair weather he wore a thread-bare cap, an inch thick in / grease and dirt, made of a thing that was once cloth, and lined in scurf / and dandruff. His cassock, some said, was miraculous, for no man knew / what colour it was of; some seeing no sign of hair on it, concluded it / was made of frogs' skins; others said it was a mere shadow, or a / phantom; near at hand it looked somewhat black, and at a distance / bluish. He wore no girdle, cuffs, nor band; so that his long hair and / scanty short cassock made him look like the messenger of death. Each / shoe might have served for a Philistine's coffin. As for his chamber, / there was not so much as a cob-web in it, the spiders being all starved / to death. He put spells upon the mice, for fear they should gnaw some / scraps of bread he kept. His bed was on the floor, and he always lay / upon one side, for fear of wearing out the sheets; in short, he was the / Archpauper and Protomiser. Into this prodigy's hands I fell, and lived / under him with Don Diego. The night we came, he showed us our room, and / made us a short speech, which was no longer, out of mere good husbandry.