ALMARIA VELLA — In a meeting convened before the hour of six at the counting-house on the Rambla, Don Agustí de Cordoba received the officers of the Chamber of Commerce, two under-secretaries from the Treasury, and a delegation of ferry operators from the outer islands, and counselled, in that measured voice which has so often stood between our commonwealth and its passions, that the Fuel Stabilisation Reserve is not to be broached in haste.

The pumps, as every householder from Almaria Vella to the quays of Cordoba harbour now knows, stand at a mark unseen in three years. The fishing fleets have begun to husband their fuel as a miser husbands his candles; the small ferrymen who bind the outer islands to the mainland speak of tying up their boats before the summer season has properly opened. Into this chorus of legitimate anxiety the Leader of the Opposition, Madame Renko, has thrown her accustomed demand that the reserve be opened at once and without condition — a counsel, it must be said, more suited to the hustings than to the ledger.

"The reserve exists precisely so that it need not be used lightly," Don Cordoba told the delegation, according to persons present at the meeting. "To empty the cistern at the first dry week is to guarantee thirst in August." He added, with that dry courtesy which his adversaries mistake for coldness, that the Crown's servants were already examining the subsidy framework and that relief, when it came, would come in a form that did not mortgage the winter to pay for the spring.

The Prime Minister, Don Esteban Vela, is understood to have received Don Cordoba's memorandum late in the evening and to have circulated it among the emergency cabinet sub-committee which has sat, now, on four successive days. Our correspondent at the Palau understands that the sub-committee will recommend a targeted subsidy to the fishing cooperatives of Cordoba and to the licensed ferry operators of the Bloc del Puerto, funded from the contingency line rather than from any draw upon the reserve itself. A formal announcement is expected before the weekend.

The President of the Chamber, for his part, accepted the counsel with the reluctance of a man whose members telephone him hourly. "We came asking for the reserve," he is reported to have said as he left the counting-house, "and we leave with a promise of subsidy. I shall take the promise, and I shall hold him to it."

There is, beneath the arithmetic, a graver consideration. The surge in crude has its origin not in any Almarian failing but in the postures of great powers in the eastern basin, whose calculations take no account of a ferryman at Sant Joan or a trawler's wife in Cordoba. To draw down the reserve now, while those postures harden, would be to disarm ourselves against a winter whose severity no forecaster yet dares to name. Don Cordoba's counsel, in this matter as in others, is the counsel of the man who has read the ledger to its last page.

The Chamber will reconvene on Monday. The reserve, for the present, remains sealed. And the pumps, we regret to report, will climb again tomorrow.