In the title story an old man jealously guards his teenage wife against the temptations of the outside world. It seems as if he will succeed until his calculated innocence is matched by a young man’s cunning. ‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’, a lively portrayal of Seville low life, follows the picaresque adventures of a card-sharper and a pickpocket. These two stories are taken from Cervantes’s Exemplary Stories, which first appeared in 1613 and is published in Penguin Classics.