Excerpt from Roland Cashel, Vol. 1 of 2
Our tale opens on a gorgeous night of Midsummer - at an era so little remote, that to name the precise year could have no interest for the reader, and in a region which seemed to combine all that is delightful in climate with whatever is luxuriant and splendid in vegetation. It was upon the bank of a small river, a tributary of the Oronoco, not very distant from the picturesque city of Barcelonetta, that a beautiful villa stood, the elegance of whose architecture, and the lavish magnificence of whose decorations, were alike evidence that neither taste nor wealth were wanting to its proprietor.
In this land where Nature had been so prodigal of her gifts, the luxurious appointments of this princely abode seemed to partake of the character of a fairy palace; and the admixture of objects of high art, the treasures of Italian galleries and Spanish collections, with the more vivid realities of the scene, favoured this illusion. The fortunate owner of this paradise was a certain Pedro Rica, who, for something like fourteen years, had been a resident of Columbia. A widower, with an only child, then an infant of scarce a year old, he had arrived in that country seeking, as he said, by new scenes, and new associations, to erase, so far as might be, the painful memory of his late bereavement.
While he gave it to be understood that he was a Spaniard by birth, some averred that he was a Mexican; others, that he was a Texan; and one or two alleged that he was an American of the States, an assumption that the ease and fluency of his English went far to corroborate.
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