Note 498 — Chapter XX

This farce, much like an entremes or saynete of modern times, is a quarrel between two lackeys for a damsel of their own condition, which ends with one of them being half drowned by the other in a public fountain. It winds up with a ballad older than itself; for it alludes to a street as being about to be constructed through Leganitos, while one of the personages in the farce speaks of the street as already there. The fountain is appropriately introduced, for Leganitos was famous for it. (See Cervantes, Ilustre Fregona, and D. Quixote, Parte II., c. 22, with the note of Pellicer.) Such little circumstances abound in the popular portions of the old Spanish drama, and added much to its effect at the time it appeared.