In “Pedro Sánchez” Pereda, not without trepidation, travelled outside his native region to Madrid, then, in 1854, “a large tumbledown village, parched, old, and dirty;”[112] but Pedro Sanchez is a _montañés_, and the first part of the book, before he leaves his native _Montaña_, in style far exceeds the rest. The chief[113] works of Pereda, after “El Sabor de la Tierruca” and “Pedro Sánchez,” were “Sotileza” (1885), “La Puchera” (1889), and “Peñas arriba” (1895). “Sotileza” is a novel of the old, now vanished, Santander. Both in the characters and the language it is the most local of Pereda’s novels, and it is perhaps the one which has become most famous. It has an atmosphere of pitch and tar and sea-weed, and in the _Calle Alta_ nets and tattered rags hang from the balconies, fishwives quarrel shrilly, and the strident, piercing cry of the sardine-seller rends the air. Andrés, Muergo, and Cleto are all in love with Silda, and Silda, growing up slight and graceful, and called _Sotileza_ from the name for the thin wire or gut to which the fish-hook is attached, is not naturally prone to let her feelings appear. But Andrés, the son of a prosperous captain in the merchant service, cannot marry beneath him; Muergo, the half-brutish, half-childish nephew of tío Mechelín and tía Sidora, with whom Sotileza, an orphan, lives, is conveniently drowned in a storm; and we leave Sotileza engaged to Cleto, the honest son of tío Mocejón, who, with his wife, la Sargüeta, and his daughter, Carpia, are the terror of the _Calle Alta_ and of _el pae Polinar_. El padre Apolinar is a charitable, homely priest who receives his poor petitioners with gruff words, but ends by giving them the little that he possesses. One night, as he is writing his important sermon, he is interrupted--not for the first time--by a poor woman whose husband is ill. “Let her go to the doctor,” he exclaims; but when he finds they are starving, “_Ave María Purísima_,” he cries twice, “and he has three children and a wife, and there is no more honest man.” He orders his old servant to bring the _puchero_ containing potatoes and a little meat--the priest’s evening meal. After sniffing it deliciously, he sends it off to the sick man, and as he resumes his sermon he says to himself: “I have certainly read somewhere that to keep in good health when engaged on so difficult a task as the one I now have in hand, there is nothing better than to go to bed hungry. Well, there is no doubt as to my being hungry, wolfishly hungry, to-night.” Sotileza leaves an impression of wind-driven spray and tossing seas, of manly courageous effort and vigour and zest of living; the difficulty of the language and the roughness of the life described alike contribute to the power and convincing character of the work. Pereda never showed more admirably his capacity to raise the commonest lives, the most vulgar incidents and the language of the street--of the strident _Calle Alta_ from which _pae Polinar_ fled in comical dismay--to the region of high art. There is something epical about his figures, in the clamorous feuds of the fishwives not less than in the serene heroism of the deep-sea fishermen. “La Puchera” is only half a sea-novel. The inhabitants of Robleces only go sea-fishing to eke out the miserable pittance won by cultivation of the soil. Thus in the house of Juan Pedro (called _El Lebrato_) and Pedro Juan, his son (nicknamed _El Josco_, from his ferocious shyness), fishing-tackle and oars mingle with agricultural tools. Juan Pedro is a widower, and father and son are entirely devoted to one another, but their house is untidy and uncomfortable for lack of a woman’s care. Pedro Juan is in love with Pilara, Pilara is in love with Pedro Juan, her family encourages the match, his father asks for nothing better, but Pedro Juan cannot break through his timidity and bring himself to speak. At last, however, he is emboldened when Pilara at the haymaking, in scarlet skirt, bodice of striped blue, and headkerchief of many colours, arranging the hay on the cart as he forks it up to her, leaps laughingly from the last hay-cart into his arms. “Pilara, from here to the Church for the señor priest to marry us. Will you agree to it?” And she answers, “We might have been back long ago, _hijo de mi alma_, if you had been different.” Though the miser of the book, Don Baltasar, is most skilfully drawn, its interest centres more especially in the life of Juan Pedro and Pedro Juan: Juan Pedro, gay and talkative, appearing on festival days with his famous sea-boots, his Cochin-China medal, and a silk necktie; Pedro Juan, who at his wedding, when asked by the priest, Don Alejo, if he will have Pilara to be his wife, answers: “And will I not indeed? She knows well I will, and you know it too.”