The Strange Friend of Tito Gil

Tito Gil was a poor boy, tall, thin and sallow, with great black eyes, and a frank, open face; badly dressed and awkward, but possessed of a bright happy disposition. At the time our story opens, he was about nineteen years of age; the son, nephew, grand-nephew, cousin and Heaven knows what more, to the best of the old Court shoemakers. His mother, Crispina Lopez, died in giving him birth, and her husband, Juan Gil, did not regard the child with much affection until he learned that he might be left a widower, from which it may be inferred that the poor shoemaker and Crispina Lopez were an example of brief but bad marriages.