The Program for the Chicago meetings of the MLA in 1925 announced a paper of mine, to be read by title, on the “discovery” of the metre of the Cid. To academic friends who had urged a more tentative phrasing (as “Modest Proposals for a New Theory,” etc.), I had replied briskly that, as a scholar, nothing should deter me from proclaiming the exact truth—not even academic decorum. But this blatant and cantankerous pride suffered forthwith at the hands of Divine Providence a chastisement that continues to this present. Providence, using mortal instruments of course, at once altered my armorial family name in the Bulletin to a meagre and humiliating “Jones”; and prevented my attendance at the sessions, and all discussion of the “discovery” by my accredited representatives Professors Solalinde and Berkowitz, except a few pleading words incidental to a discussion of a paper by Professor Hills. Providence then saw to it that I spent six painful months in preparing a long monograph on the “discovery” and a year more in laboring in company with devoted Spanish friends of both sexes on a revised version in Spanish, which, after devious misadventures in the Iberian Peninsula, finally reached the composing-room of the Revista de Archivos, in Madrid. The first installment appeared in March, 1929 (pages 334–352), under date of Octubre a Diciembre de 1928. I corrected proof on the second last summer (1929): it too concludes with the editor's optimistic “Continuará.” Perhaps some Hispanistas over there are impatiently awaiting the rest; but, as this erudite journal is apparently not as widely consulted in America as it should be, I am inclined to suspect that perhaps the only member of the MLA who is engaged in watchful waiting is the petulant author. Meantime, those among us who have only hearsay knowledge of the “discovery” doubtless think me a swindler. Such has been my chastisement for committing the chief of those seven deadly sins that heretofore have been so frequently discussed in the PMLA … only in a theoretical manner.