THE ADUANA DE SANTO DOMINGO
harder than all of them put together; and was everywhere at once among them urging them to hurry and to hurry; and to any one of them who showed even the slightest sign of lagging there came from Don Juan's mouth a berating volleying of scorpions and snakes and toads!
In very truth, Señor, such was Don Juan's raging energy that he was as a frenzied person. But it was a frenzy that had no real madness in it: because everything that he did and that he made to be done was directed by a most sensible discretion—so that not a moment of time nor the turn of a hand was wasted, and in every single instant the building grew and grew. And the upshot of it all was that he accomplished just what he had made his whole soul up he would accomplish: within the six months that Doña Sara had given him to do his work in, he did do it-and even with a little time to spare. Three full days before the last of his six months was ended the Aduana was finished to the very least part of its smallest detail; and Don Juan—all aglow over his triumphant fulfilment of Doña Sara's almost impossible condition—carried the key of that perfectly completed vast structure to the
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