IN SUNNY SPAIN

THE GYPSY KING

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York.

To
ELIZABETH KEITH

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor of the Series

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

The verses in this story, with the exception of the two snatches, in chapters 6 and 14, of ballads of the Cid, I have translated directly out of Spanish folk-song. Some of these, especially riddles, and others, especially those sung in the circle-dances, have previously appeared in The Churchman and in my Spanish Highways and Byways and are used here by the courtesy of The Churchman publishers and of the Messrs. Macmillan Company.

Katharine Lee Bates.

The Scarab. June 3, 1913.

IN SUNNY SPAIN

I

PILARICA IN THE MOORISH GARDEN

AT last, at last, that tiresome stint of embroidery was done. The threads, no longer white, had tangled so often under the impatient tugs of those rosy little fingers that it was fully half an hour later than usual before Pilarica could jump up from the threshold, run back through the house to Tia Marta, display those finished three inches of “labors” and plead:

“Tia Marta, with your kind permission I will now go out to play.”

Tia Marta was stooping over a great, open chest in the inner room whose only other furniture was a wide, low bedstead and two canvas cots. All the family slept there except Pilarica’s big brother, Rodrigo, who was a student in the Institute of Granada and so, being a person of dignity, had the curtained box-bed in the kitchen. This outer room, like the bedroom behind it, was all of stone and so dim that the light from the doorway showed only a glimmer of copper and pewter on the side where the cooking was done. The bedroom had a window, so narrow that it seemed hardly more than a slit cut in the thick stone of the wall. There was no glass in the window and there were no rugs nor carpets on the cold, tiled floors.

Tia Marta, huddled over the big chest in the duskiest corner of all, could not have seen the embroidery well, even though Pilarica’s eagerness thrust it close against the squinting red eyes; but she scolded, for Tia Marta enjoyed scolding, quite as sharply as if every moist little stitch had been measured and found wanting.

“Worse and worse! The very gypsies would be ashamed to wear it. The donkeys would bray at it. What is to become of a girl born without the needle-gift? The saints take pity! But get you out into the sunshine, child, and play! This house is as dark as a wolf’s mouth. Out of doors with you!”

TIA MARTA SCOLDS

And Tia Marta thrust the strip of linen back to Pilarica with such a jerk that the needle flew off the thread, slid to the floor and, after a merry hop or two, hid itself in a crack. This was fun for the needle, but it kept Pilarica away from the garden for ten minutes more while her small palms rubbed over the worn, uneven tiles in anxious search. But as soon as she knelt down and prayed to Santa Rita, the clever saint who can find anything that is lost, the needle gave her knee a saucy prick and consented, after its run-away frolic, to be stuck into the cloth again. For, you see, the needle had been working hard, too, and wanted its bit of holiday as much, perhaps, as Pilarica wanted hers.

But the loss of those ten minutes out of her golden afternoon was a sore trial to the little girl and she dashed like a tiny whirlwind through the house to fling herself, sobbing and laughing both at once, into the arms of Grandfather. He sat, white-haired and dreamy-eyed, his guitar on the mosaic bench beside him, under the olive-tree before the door. It was so comforting to feel the tender clasp of the old, trembling arms and to hear the slow and broken but still sweet old voice that had crooned over Pilarica since her earliest memory.

“What’s this? What’s this? Dew on my red rosebud? Hush, Heart of Honey, hush! I have a new riddle for you.

Pilarica promptly pointed her two forefingers at her still tearful eyes.

“That is easy,” she said, slipping to her knees upon the ground and leaning against the end of the bench. “Please tell me one, a bad, rude one, about a needle. I do hate needles so.”

Grandfather did not have to think long, for he was the wisest man in Spain, as all the children on the Alhambra hill would have told you, and he knew more rhymes and riddles than all the professors in all the universities and all the preachers in all the pulpits put together. So presently he began to repeat in the soft, singsong tone that always soothed Pilarica like the murmur of running water:

Will this do?” he asked. “For there is another, and I see that just now the needle is no favorite at all with my little lady here.”

“I would like, please, to hear the other,” replied Pilarica promptly, for surely one could not know too many riddles, especially about anything so vexatious as a needle.

And Grandfather, after letting his fingers wander for a minute over the strings of the guitar to refresh his memory, chanted this other:

“One more, dear Grandfather, if you will do me the favor,” coaxed the child.

“One more,” assented Grandfather, lightly kissing the red carnation which Pilarica, like a true little Andalusian, had tucked into her rippling mass of soft dark hair. “One more, but not about the needle this time.

Dear me! What paths did he mean? Pilarica sprang to her feet and looked about her on a scene of wonderful beauty. For the two gloomy rooms in which the family ate and slept were all that remained of an old Moorish palace, once as dazzling in its strange and delicate splendor as if it had been carven out of moonlight and jeweled by the frost. Time had destroyed those silvery walls and towers, those airy arches and columns, but it had dealt gently with the lordly pleasure-garden, which only grew lovelier and lovelier through the centuries of neglect. When the Christian armies, long ago, drove the grave, dark-faced, turbaned Moors down from the Alhambra hill, out of Spain, and back over the narrow strip of sea to the north coast of Africa, the household that had to flee from this fair home must have turned at the garden gate and sighed as they looked their last on their lost Eden. Now the roses clambered over the broken marble basins of the seven fountains, but the sparkling jets of water were as limpid as ever and, when they were all playing, Pilarica could bathe under the spray of a different fountain every day in the week.

What paths did he mean? “Not gray, nor black, nor brown,” for there were no hues so dull as these in this rainbow wilderness. “Nor blue, nor white”? There had been walks of sky-tinted porcelain and creamy marble once, and other walks of many-colored tiles, set in patterns of stars and crescents and circles, but the myrtle hedges had sent out rambling sprays of yellow blossoms to clamber over these, and fallen orange flowers and jasmine petals, acacia blooms and drifting leaves of all sorts helped with their fragrant litter to hide the pavement of those winding ways. “Nor green”? There were trees upon trees in the garden, solemn cypresses and soaring palms, magnolias with their great, sweet blossoms, cedars with level boughs, banana trees and lemon and citron and pomegranate, oleanders with their clusters of snowy flowers, and the leafless coral tree, blooming in brilliant scarlet. Only the birds, whose wings went flashing from one beckoning branch to another, knew how many, many green paths there were amidst the leafage of those marvellous boughs. And while Pilarica was still gazing with happy eyes right up and away into that waving world of twinkling sprays and glowing blossoms, a sudden ray of sunlight struck across a pink-plumed almond and slanted down to Pilarica’s swinging feet.

“Sunbeams! Yellow paths!” cried Pilarica, clapping her hands.

The sunbeam danced a little, just a little, but enough to awake in those small sandalled feet an irresistible desire to run and play. So the child slipped away from Grandfather’s knee and left him to doze again, one withered hand still straying on the strings of his guitar and calling out notes of dreamy music even as he slept.

Pilarica tripped along by a hedge of boxwood, in which Rodrigo had amused himself by cutting out, some five feet apart, queer shapes of peacocks and lions and eagles. To each of these she gave a swift caress in passing, for they seemed, in a way, like playmates, and their rustling green faces were very pleasant to kiss. A shade of anxiety was gathering in her eyes, for her other brother, Rafael, was a seeker for hid treasure. The boy had often annoyed some ancient snail in its hermitage and sent the lizards scampering like flashes of green light by his groping about the bottom of cracked marble cisterns and flower-choked baths, but he had never yet found any riches of the Moors, not one alabaster jar full of rubies and emeralds nor even a single nest of pearls as large as hen’s eggs,—no, not although he had dug by moonlight with a spade dipped three times in the Sultana Fountain and rubbed dry with bunches of pungent rosemary. Perhaps Rafael might have been more successful if the Sultana had been less dilapidated. She was now merely a slender foot poised on the basin rim and a white arm clasping the central shaft of porphyry. All else had been broken away ages since, but this mainly missing Sultana was none the less the lady of Rafael’s homage and he would not allow Pilarica, never once, to kiss that uptilted marble heel.

But although Rafael was not fortunate in finding the buried treasure of the Moors, he was always coming upon buried treasure of Pilarica’s, to her great indignation and concern. All over the garden were hidden her little hoards of such childish wealth as Tia Marta’s well-worn broom would send spinning out of the house,—fragments of ruddy pottery, bits of sunrise-hued mosaic, choice feathers shed by the garden birds, feathers that might some day be fashioned into a fan, beads and ribbons that had come traveling up the Alhambra hill in Rodrigo’s pocket when there chanced to be a fair going on in Granada.

So Pilarica’s eyes, those great, changeful Andalusian eyes, that gleam like jewels but are in color nearest to the deep purple of pansies, grew dark, like dusky velvet, with the fear that Rafael might have found her latest gift from Big Brother, her castanets. Stepping softly from one broken piece of paving to another, along a mere thread of a path that wound in and out of the scented shrubbery, the child came to what had once been a summer-house with silken awnings, enclosed by a low marble colonnade. The blue sky roofed it now and only one of those graceful white columns was still standing and still—O happy Pilarica!—keeping safe watch and ward over the little yellow clappers, adorned with red tassels, which had been buried at its foot under a drift of perfumed leaves and petals. Pilarica caught them to her heart, those shells of hollowed wood, with a gasp of joy. Running her thumbs through the loops of red cord that bound each pair together, she flung her arms above her head and, beating out with the middle finger a sharp, clicking music from the castanets, began to dance. It was a wonderful sight to see Pilarica dance, whirling about and about, her feet as light as her heart, in the circle of the summer-house, but there was only one column to look on, and he was not greatly impressed, for he was old and weather-worn and tired and, besides, he had seen grand Moorish ladies, with castanets of ivory and pearl, dancing very much like Pilarica, hundreds of Aprils ago.

II

THE MAGIC CAP

“WHOOP!” sounded suddenly from over Pilarica’s head, and a red Turkish fez came flying down from the high garden-wall, alighting neatly on the top of the solitary column. At the edge of that wall a sturdy, square-chinned boy, by way of getting up his courage for the leap, was chanting an old nursery rhyme:

Thump! The boy was sitting on the ground, in the very center of the summer-house, vigorously rubbing those portions of his body which had suffered most in the adventure; but as Pilarica, with the deference due to an athlete as well as to a brother, sprang up and handed him his cap, he flung it on, cocked it jauntily and shook back the gilt tassels that were tickling his ears.

“This is a magic cap and, when I wear it, I am anybody I choose to be,” announced the new-comer, somewhat breathlessly. “I am now,” he continued, still sitting on the ground but waving his arms suggestively, “Rafael the Archangel.”

“You are welcome to your house, my lord Archangel,” faltered Pilarica, not forgetting her manners, but holding her precious castanets tightly clasped behind her back.

“What have you there?” queried Rafael, pulling off his hempen sandals and anxiously inspecting the soles of his feet.

Poor little Pilarica, into whom courtesy had been instilled as the first of all the virtues, winked hard, but held out the castanets toward her brother.

“They are at your service,” she faltered. But Rafael, too, could practise the Andalusian graces when he had a mind.

“They are very well placed where they are,” he returned affably in the set phrase proper to the occasion and, giving his gay fez a twirl, he added: “I am not the Archangel any more, but the high and mighty Moor Abdorman Murambil Xarif, master of this palace. You are my Christian captive and will now dance for me.”

“But I do not want to be a Christian captive,” protested Pilarica.

“Would you rather be a dog of an infidel, a follower of false Mahound?” demanded Rafael, in a tone of shocked reproach. “If so, I shall have to sweep you into the sea.”

“But ar’n’t you a dog of an infidel, too, since you are a Moor?” asked Pilarica in that keen way of hers, which her brother often found disconcerting.

Rafael caught off his red cap with a pettish gesture and tossed it aside.

“Your tongue is too full of words, Pilarica,” he grumbled. “It is unseemly to answer back. I am a year older than you. What’s more, I am a boy and you are a girl. As Tia Marta says, the fingers of the hand are not equal.”

Pilarica spread out the little brown fingers of her right hand and considered them so seriously that Rafael was encouraged to go on.

“Besides, I have heard Rodrigo say that a woman who speaks Latin always comes to a bad end.”

“But I do not speak Latin,” pleaded Pilarica. “Isn’t Latin the gori-gori-goo that the priests sing in the church? I do not see why anyone should learn it, for Grandfather says that in heaven the angels all speak Spanish.”

“Of course they do,” assented Rafael proudly. “Spanish is the most beautiful language that ever was spoken, just as the Spaniards are the best and bravest people on the earth.”

“Who are the other people on the earth? Are they all followers of false Mahound, like the Moors?” asked Pilarica.

Rafael frowned. There never was a girl like Pilarica for asking inconvenient questions.

“Child,” he said, looking as ancient and impressive as any eight-year-old could, “did Grandfather ever tell you the story of Juan Cigarron?”

“Not yet,” replied Pilarica meekly, “but it would give me great pleasure to hear it, if you please.”

“Grandfather tells me many more stories than he tells you,” boasted Rafael. “You are all for riddles and verses, but he and I talk together, like men, of the affairs of the world. Juan Cigarron, who lived a long, long while ago, before you, and even I, had been born, made believe that he was a great magician and could see anything, even if it was hidden in the very depths of the earth, unless, to be sure, there was a blue cloth wrapped around it.”

“Why blue?” asked Pilarica.

“Why not?” retorted Rafael, quite angrily. “Will you listen to my story, or will you be forever chattering? The King sent for Juan Cigarron and asked him many questions and, by great good luck, he was able to answer every one. Then the King, for a reward, promised to grant him whatever he might wish, even though it were the gold crown on the King’s head, but Juan Cigarron did not wish for the crown. He wished that His Majesty might never ask him anything again. Oh! And that reminds me,” exclaimed Rafael, jumping up quite forgetful of his bumps and bruises and tossing on his cap once more, “that the Gypsy King is to tell me my fortune this very afternoon.”

Pilarica clasped her hands in silent appeal, and her eyes grew so starry with hope that Rafael, already beyond the limits of the summer-house, looked back, swaying doubtfully on one foot.

“Tia Marta does not allow you to go over to the gypsy quarter,” he objected.

“Nor you, either,” was on the tip of Pilarica’s tongue, but she wisely bit it back, urging:

“The Gypsy King will not have gone home so early. He will be waiting near the Alhambra, sitting on the fountain-steps, looking for tourists who may buy his photograph for a peseta. And besides,” she added with innocent tact, “Tia Marta knows that I am safe anywhere with you.”

Rafael swaggered.

“Of course you are,” he announced grandly. “You are my little sister, and I, even though a bull should charge upon me, would stand before you as strong as the columns in the temple of Solomon. Come on! I will ask Tia Marta if you may go with me.”

So the children raced gleefully across the garden, dodging in and out among geraniums, heliotrope and fuchsias that had grown into great shrubs like trees, but paused at the fretted Moorish arch that now performed the humble office of their kitchen door, to see what Grandfather was doing. The old man, whom the circle of the years had brought back near to childhood, was playing happily with a snail that found itself halted in some important journey of its own by his protruding foot.

“A riddle! a riddle for the snail!” coaxed Pilarica, throwing herself down on the ground to lift the wee round traveller over that meddlesome mountain; and Grandfather, after strumming a minute on his guitar, recited:

Meanwhile Rafael, who felt himself quite too grown-up for riddles, had dived into the darkness of the house, whence he soon came scampering out, followed by the shrill tones of Tia Marta.

“The Gypsy King, indeed! And what sort of a king is that? Everyone is as God has made him, and very often worse.”

“But may Pilarica go?” called Rafael.

“Ask her grandfather. Am I a donkey, to bear all the burdens of this household?”

“May I go, Grandfather?” teased Pilarica. The old man nodded at least twenty times and, catching up the word donkey, struck with his quavering voice into a popular tune:

“Haw-hee!” echoed Rafael, with such a good imitation of a bray that a genuine ass made sonorous answer from the highroad beyond.

“Grandfather says I may go,” cried Pilarica joyfully into the arched doorway.

“Bah!” responded Tia Marta. “His heart is softer than a ripe fig.”

But she did not take back the permission, and Pilarica had the rare delight of an excursion with Rafael outside the garden.

Half ashamed of his condescension, the boy did not spare her, but tore at his full speed along the dusty road, between giant hedges of aloes, with their blue, sworded leaves, and lances tipped with yellow blossoms, so that it was a very hot, panting little girl who arrived, hardly a minute behind him, at the fountain on whose steps was enthroned the Gypsy King.

This was a very splendid personage indeed, with his high, peaked hat sparkling all over with pendants of colored glass that flashed back the sun like crown jewels. His slashed jacket was wondrously embroidered and spangled and his broad sash was of scarlet silk. Even his trousers and stockings looked as if he had been wading in a sunset. Smiling on Pilarica, he drew a bright cup from his wallet and, leaning toward the fountain, filled it with water that could not have looked more deliciously fresh and cold if the cup had been made of purest silver instead of gypsy tin. But thirsty as she was, the little Andalusian maiden handed the cup back to the giver.

“After you, please,” she said as sweetly as if her throat were not almost choked with the white dust.

The Gypsy King bowed with much majesty and touched the cup to his lips, but then she insisted on passing it to Rafael, who made short work of draining its contents to the last drop. He did not fail, however, to fill it again for his sister, so that, at last, Pilarica found herself seated on the lowest step, at the feet of the fortune teller, quite cool and comfortable.

But the picturesque old gypsy, although he could not help being kind to Pilarica, was in a gloomy mood. He had sold only one of his photographs all day long, and that to a rude young foreigner—we hope it was not an American—who had laughed at his kingship to his face and spun him the silver coin so carelessly that it had rolled into a crevice of the stone work and joined the lost treasures of the Alhambra. And well the poor old gypsy knew that, however much he might pose as a king in his flaunting hat and gaudy jacket by day, with twilight he must make his way back to the rows of human dens that burrow into the hillside across the river Darro. And there, as soon as he should draw back the dirty flap of cloth from the entrance of his own cave, his swarthy young wife, Xarifa, would demand the amount of his day’s earnings and, when he confessed to an empty wallet, would fly into such a passion that the heavy silver earrings would pound against her raven hair and every flounce on her bright orange petticoat would seem to bristle with rage. He could tell his own fortune, for that evening, only too well,—a shame-faced old fellow perched on a stool in the corner, trying with trembling hands to mend a cooking tin or a piece of harness, while Xarifa’s furious voice went on and on, until at last he should be suffered to fall asleep on the heap of ragged sheepskins that served him for a royal couch.

So although on yesterday, when he had sold three photographs and had three pesetas jingling in his purse, the Gypsy King had promised to tell Rafael’s fortune as an act of friendship, to-day he was stubbornly silent, holding out his palm to be crossed with silver. Rafael’s flush met the red edges of his fez. The only silver he had was a little watch and chain that his father had given him when, three years ago, that gallant naval engineer left his children, whose mother had just died, in the care of Grandfather and Tia Marta and sailed away, under the red and yellow flag of Spain, to do his part for king and country. No one guessed how deeply Rafael loved that absent father, the hero of all his dreams, but the boy had even more than the usual share of Spanish pride and, with a sudden gulp that was not far from a sob, he dropped the watch and chain into that greedy palm.

And he could make nothing of the fortune, after all. The Gypsy King, muttering strange words that only gypsies know, bent forward and with his staff traced rude figures in the sand,—a train of mules, a cockle-shell, a battle-ship; but suddenly he lifted his staff and touched it lightly to Rafael’s magic cap.

“That is your fortune,” he declared. “It will turn toads into nightingales and stones into bread. Don’t give that away, my little gentleman, even to the gypsies.”

III

FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES

THE eyes of the Gypsy King began to glitter like jet beads. He had caught sight of an omnibus toiling up the Alhambra hill, and after the first a second, and after the second a third. Tourists! A party of foreign tourists! A host of golden, gullible tourists! Ah, Xarifa would be pleased with him, after all. She would toss him off a panful of crisp fritters for supper and then sit with him in the mouth of their cave, enjoying all the gypsy jest and music. With surprising nimbleness he climbed to the top step of the fountain, and there he stood, brandishing his hat high above his head and bowing and beckoning and twisting and bowing again until Pilarica turned quite giddy just from watching him.

“Come away!” ordered Rafael, tugging at her hand, and she followed her brother to the ivied wall beneath that bell-tower on whose top the first cross was lifted after the Christians had taken the Alhambra from the Moors. Here Rafael busied himself in gathering together a few smooth stones, as much in the shape of Spanish rolls as he could find, and arranging them in a row.

“Count out!” he commanded Pilarica, and the little girl, dancing up and down the line as she sang, proceeded to touch with an airy foot one stone and then another and another in turn.

Before the song was ended, Rafael had clapped his magic cap over the stone designated by Q and stood, with red lips firmly pressed together, abiding results.

“Sing something else, Pilarica,” he entreated, “or else I cannot, cannot wait.”

And Pilarica, with a quick instinct for what would hold his attention, piped up the song by which Spanish children keep in memory the name of a true patriot. By the middle of the second line, Rafael’s fresh treble was chiming in with hers, though his gaze never wavered from the wonder-working fez.

“Now! now!” cried Rafael, and whisked the red cap off the stone, which looked—precisely as it had looked before. Not one flake of puffy crust, not one white, tempting crumb betrayed whatever change might have come to pass under that magic covering. The children fell flat on their stomachs on either side of this doubtful substance and first Rafael, then Pilarica, thrust out a red tongue and licked it cautiously. The taste was gritty. Rafael tried to take a bite, but his white young teeth slipped helplessly off the flinty surface. The boy squatted back on his heels, his small fists clenched, and glared darkly out before him.

“Perhaps one of the others—” faltered Pilarica.

“They are all alike,” interrupted Rafael, in a voice harsh with mounting anger. “They are stones, just stones, and they always will be stones. I knew it all the time.”

“Our rolls are very, very hard once in a while,” ventured the little girl again, but this remark was met with scornful silence.

“Or I might hunt for a toad,” she persisted, dismayed by Rafael’s sombre stare. “Toads are much softer than stones, and perhaps—”

But the boy had bounded to his feet and was stamping furiously upon the magic cap.

“The gypsy is a humbug, and the cap is a humbug,” he exclaimed chokingly, “and I have been cheated out of my watch and chain,—my silver watch and chain that my father gave me. I will not bear it. I am going down the hill to meet Rodrigo, and he will make that lying old thief give them back to me.”

And without another glance toward the little sister whom he had so loftily taken under his protection, Rafael, bare-headed, dashed away and disappeared down the steep avenue by which Rodrigo usually came home from the Institute.

The tears trembled for a moment on Pilarica’s long eyelashes, as she found herself thus forsaken, but she was a practical little person on occasion, as the sisters of impulsive brothers needs must be, and so she picked up the red fez, brushed away the dust, folded it neatly and hid it in her bodice. Then she scattered the stones far and wide, so that Rafael might not come upon that unlucky row again and be stung by the reminder of his loss.

And what next? For a moment the child looked longingly down, from her green nook, on the outspread city of Granada, with its clusters of gray towers and spires that seemed to be talking together in the purple air about the times that were. Rafael was allowed to go half-way down the Alhambra hill to meet Rodrigo, and sometimes Rodrigo, on a holiday, would take his little brother into the city with him for a whole afternoon, but Rodrigo, who was a student and knew everything, said it was best for girls to bide at home. Only yesterday Rafael had gone into Granada with Rodrigo, to see a wonder-working troupe of jugglers, and returned rejoicing in the red fez. An Arab peddler, who was, as well, snake-charmer and sword-eater, pleased by the boy’s wide-eyed admiration of his exploits, had tossed it to him with the laughing words: “Red is the color of magic.” And Tia Marta went down to Granada sometimes with the donkey Shags for the frugal family supplies, but she could not be bothered with Pilarica, while Grandfather, who never found Pilarica a bother, was too feeble now for the confusion of the city streets and for the long climb back up the hill.

So the child lifted her wistful eyes from the proud old city to the far sweep of the plain beyond, a plain rich in gardens and vineyards, orchards and olive-groves, and then she looked out further yet to the ranks of snow-clad mountains that shut in the view. Those glistening summits made her lonely, and when a scamper of small feet came her way and a cry of eager voices called her name, Pilarica leapt down from her perch on the wall and let herself be swept along with the roguish little rabble of the Alhambra hill.

Tia Marta always scolded when Pilarica was found playing with the Alhambra children, for there were usually a few gypsies, rude and lawless, in the group, and some even of the Spaniards were so ill-bred as to make sport of strangers. But they were children, for all that, with the blithe laughter of children, and all the more determined to play with Pilarica because they knew that Pilarica was forbidden to play with them.

“To the Alhambra!” cried Arnaldo. “There are many people there, ugly people, with blue eyes, and hair the color of lemons, and faces flat like pesetas. There are so many that Don Francisco is as flustered as a fish in hot water and he has forgotten to lock the door after them. He will not notice us at all if we are careful to keep a court or two behind. But you must not run on and beg of the people, Zinga, and you, Leandro, must not be slipping your sly fingers into the ladies’ bags, or we shall all be driven out together.”

“I will do as I choose,” retorted the wild-haired gypsy girl, while the hawk-eyed gypsy lad, barely in his teens but already a skillful pickpocket, gripped the gay-handled knife in his belt and scowled defiance at Arnaldo.

Pilarica, frightened by the fierce looks, fell back with the little ones, Isabelita and Carmencita, chubby Pepito, and the gypsy two-year-olds, Rosita and Benito, letting the bigger and rougher children lead the way. So in two companies they tagged after the tourists up into the Court of Myrtles, with its great pool enclosed by myrtle hedges, and on to the Hall of the Ambassadors, whose walls are like lace of rare design and whose domed ceiling, all white and gold and blue, studded with starry figures, seems a bit of sky. When they had come to the Court of the Lions, whose multitude of white marble columns look, in their varied grouping, like guests frozen by some playful enchantment just as they were chatting together or musing apart in this exquisite throne-room of the Sultans, the smaller children began to lag. Plump Pepito sat down firmly on the floor. Carmencita, startled by the twelve marble lions that uphold the fountain-basin in the center, puckered up her face for a cry, and Pilarica, to divert her, started one of the circle-games in which Spanish children delight. Hand in hand, the little dancers tripped about like a ring of fairies, until Pilarica’s clear voice led them in the song of San Serení, the well-beloved Saint of Gentleness. All but the wee gypsies knew every stanza, singing lustily, and even Benito and Rosita acted out the gymnastic movements with the rest, kneeling, sitting, lying back and jumping up again, as the several verses directed.

Their own games were much more interesting to the children than the glories of the old Moorish palace, and they flocked about Pilarica, each clamoring for a favorite dance.

“Little Bird Pinta,” teased Isabelita.

“Little White Pigeons,” whined Carmencita, who was always on the verge of tears.

“Little Blind Hen,” shouted Pepito.

“Pin—Pige—Hen,” echoed the gypsy babies impartially.

“The Charcoal Woman,” wept Carmencita.

“Butterfly Tag,” coaxed Isabelita.

“Charcoal-Butter,” chimed in the obliging gypsy babies.

“Grasshopper! Grasshopper!” roared Pepito and thereupon began to skip about, his fat hands clasped under his knees, gasping as tunefully as he could:

“Hush! hush!” urged Pilarica. “We will play Larán-larito, and Pepito shall be the cheese.”

So Pepito, easily rolling himself up into a round, soft ball, proudly occupied the center of the scene, while the others, suiting their action to the words of the song, danced about him, ever drawing nearer and nearer, ready for the final pounce.

But just at the thrilling moment when all the five kitties flung themselves upon the plump, indignant cheese, which struck out right and left with pudgy fists and defended itself as never cheese was known to do before, there arose a hubbub in the further halls of the Alhambra and the larger boys and girls came rushing back, pursued by Don Francisco, the guardian of the palace, and a purple-faced foreigner whose voice sounded as if he were using bad language.

Arnaldo seized the hand of Isabelita, Zinga made a snatch at Rosita, and even Leandro, flinging back a silver cigar-case as he ran, paused to catch up the toddling Benito, while Carmencita wailed so piteously and Pepito bawled so lustily that the big children who had no little brothers and sisters to look after hustled these two clamorous waifs along in the flight. But nobody took thought for Pilarica, who, terrified by the hue and cry, turned and fled down one arched passage after another, across dim chambers and through long galleries, until, at last, she could hear nothing but stillness anywhere about her, and that, queerly enough, frightened her more than all the noise had done.

IV

RAFAEL IN DISGRACE

IF Rafael had waited for his brother at the Gate of the Pomegranates, as usual, things might not have turned out quite so badly. For here the way from Granada up the Alhambra hill opens into three avenues, and the boy, in his impatience, having failed to meet Rodrigo on the shortest and steepest, dashed up again by the second and down by the third, and so managed to miss him altogether. For while Rafael, back once more at the Gate of the Pomegranates, tired out by so much headlong running, was cooling his parched throat at a runlet of sparkling water, Rodrigo was already at home, opening the gate of the old garden.

A tall, dark, graceful lad of eighteen, a scholar’s satchel strapped to his shoulders, he swung the gate wide and stepped back with much deference to make way for his companion.

“After you, sir,” he said.

But this companion, a man of middle age, sturdy and square-chinned, clad in the uniform of a naval engineer, stood motionless. His face, set in stern lines, was under perfect control, yet, as the son beside him half divined, it was harder for him to enter that fragrant, blossoming enclosure than to face the enemy’s cannon. For it was here that, something over three years ago, he had brought from their simple but pleasant lodgings in Cadiz his tenderly loved wife, hoping that the air of the hilltop might restore her failing strength. Half the savings of a frugal lifetime had been spent to call a great physician from Madrid. He prescribed little medicine, but an abundance of fresh eggs and pure goat’s milk and bade them, to the horror of their devoted maid, always known to the children as Tia Marta, set the invalid’s bed out in the open. But not the restful cool of the evening air nor the living warmth of the sunshine could avail, and to the man who halted at the gate this beautiful garden was the place of sorrow. Recalled to his ship almost immediately after his wife’s death, there had been no time to find a new home for his children. So he had left them in this wild Paradise under charge of his gentle father-in-law and of the faithful, though sharp-tongued, Tia Marta. Since then he had not been able to visit them, for his ship had been sent to the Pacific, and except for brief letters, written to Rodrigo from time to time, and for the small but punctual sums of money forwarded to a Granada bank for the family support, they had heard nothing of him.

Rodrigo, too, left much to be desired as a correspondent, although his handwriting blossomed out in bolder flourishes from year to year. He wrote of his progress in his studies, his prizes in mathematics, his interest in the new English sports, his ambition to enter an engineering school and follow his father’s career, and added in a postscript that the rest of the family were well. And all their talk on the homeward climb, after the officer had astonished and rejoiced his son by calling for him at the Institute, had still been of Rodrigo, his successes, his amusements, his future. It would have amazed that vivacious youth to know that under all the kindly responses, the father’s heart was yearning toward the little daughter, longing to find in her face, hardly more than a baby face as he remembered it, some image of her mother’s. Of Rafael he scarcely thought at all. He recollected, without interest, that the younger boy was said to take after him, while both Rodrigo and Pilarica were held to resemble their mother, and it was that resemblance which he craved. He himself recognized it in Rodrigo’s sunny looks and charming manners, but the lad’s frank egotism was all his own.

The lingerer at the gate drew a long breath and entered the garden. In spite of himself, his steps turned toward an open place among the orange trees, the place where his wife’s bed had stood, but there was no bed there now, only an old, old man, seated on the ground and idly piling up the fallen fruit into a golden pyramid. As he went on with his building, he was crooning over and over:

The new-comer, for all his self-control, gave a start of painful surprise.

“Is that your grandfather?” he asked Rodrigo.

“Ay, sir, to be sure it is, and a grandfather as good as bread,” answered the lad, with a sensitive flush, while, stooping quickly, he fairly lifted the light, swaying figure to its feet.

“Never mind the oranges now, Grandfather,” he said brightly. “See! We have an honored guest.”

The old man turned a dazed look upon his son-in-law.

“I am at your feet, sir,” he quavered, in the courteous phrase of Andalusia. “The house is yours.”

“But surely you know me,—Catalina’s husband,” pleaded the stranger, opening his arms.

The old man nodded many times, but drew back from the embrace.

“You are the young man from Saragossa who would wed my daughter Catalina,” he answered slowly. “She is away just now—I forget where—but when she comes home again, we will talk of these things.” Then, moving his fingers as if he were touching the strings of a guitar, he began to sing softly:

“How long has he been like this?” asked the officer, turning sharply on Rodrigo. “And why have you told me nothing of it?”

“Your pardon, sir,” pleaded the lad, “but what was there to tell? Grandfather is often confused by evening, when he is tired. He will be quite clear-headed again in the morning. Perhaps he is not so active as he was, but he does a little work about the garden and he will amuse the children hour after hour with his stories and riddles and scraps of song. He loves Pilarica better than his eyelashes.”

“Where is Pilarica?” asked the father.

“Where is Pilarica?” echoed the old man, speaking more alertly than before. “I have played the airs that please her best, and there were no dancing feet.”

“She may be helping Tia Marta with the supper,” suggested Rodrigo, turning toward the house. “And there goes Tia Marta now. Oho! Tia Marta! Tia Marta!”

“Ay, indeed! Tia Marta! Tia Marta!” came a mocking response from where a wiry figure, arrayed in saffron kerchief and purple petticoat, was seen hurrying in another direction through the shrubbery. “Always Tia Marta, from cock-crow to pigeon-roost! Now it’s Shags that brays to Tia Marta for his mouthful of chopped straw, and then it’s Roxa that mews to Tia Marta for a morsel of dried fish. It’s not slave to every Turk I was in the days when they counted me the fairest maid and the finest dancer in Seville. But all make firewood of a fallen tree.”

“This is natural, at all events,” exclaimed the officer, with the first smile since he had entered the garden. “My good Marta, I kiss your hands.”

“Don Carlos!” screamed the old servant, her sharp brown face, so like a walnut, shining with welcome as she scrambled toward him through bushes that seemed, for very mischief, to catch at her skirts and hold her back. She grasped him by the shoulders and, as he laughingly tried to free himself, pulled down his head and gave him a resounding smack on either cheek. “May all the saints be praised! To see you safe home again is as sweet as God’s blessing. But to think—oh, I could beat my bones for very rage!—that the supper to-night is not a supper of festival.”

“Never mind that!” protested Don Carlos. “Who but you taught me the saying that no bread is hard to the hungry? Let me see the children. Where is Pilarica?”

“The children! Can I have them forever like puppies under my feet? Pilarica! Do you expect me to keep her shut up in a sugar-bowl for you? She is off with Rafael, who promised to look well after her. Never fear! He has, like every boy, a wolf in his stomach, and supper-time will soon bring them home again.”

“Off with Rafael!” repeated Rodrigo, ridding himself of his satchel. “That is why he did not meet me this afternoon at the Gate of the Pomegranates. Ha! I hear him running now,—but he is alone.”

All three—for Grandfather had wandered away in search of his guitar—turned to face a bareheaded little lad, drops of sweat standing out upon his forehead and the dark red glowing through the clear brown of his cheeks. Suddenly arrested in his rush, he stood gazing up with wide, happy eyes at the father whom he recognized at once, the father for whom he cherished in secret a passionate hero-worship.

“Where is Pilarica?” three voices asked in chorus. But Rafael heard only the deep, stern tone of Don Carlos, and it struck him dumb with dismay.

“What have you done with your sister?” demanded that accusing voice again.

“Why—I—I left her—I left her at the foot of the old Watch-Tower,” faltered the culprit.

“I wanted—I wanted to meet Rodrigo. And then—and then—I—I forgot Pilarica.”

Rafael’s voice sank lower and lower under his father’s gathering frown. That father, accustomed as a naval officer to enforce strict discipline, spoke again with such cutting rebuke that the child before him shivered from head to foot.

“How long ago was it that you deserted your sister?”

“I—I don’t know,” murmured Rafael. “An hour. Two hours. I don’t know. I—I gave my watch to the Gypsy King.”

“The thief that he was to take the poor boy’s treasure!” broke in Tia Marta, nervously trying to divert the father’s wrath. “Those gypsies would rob the Holy Child of his swaddling-clothes, and St. Joseph of his ass. Ay, they would let the young Madonna walk the desert on foot and wrap the Blessed Babe in—”

“Rodrigo,” interrupted Don Carlos, “we go to find Pilarica. And do you, Marta, never again confide my little daughter to the care of a heedless boy who cannot even guard his own pockets.”

For a moment Rafael stood as if stunned, his black head drooping. He had dreamed so often of his father’s home-coming, but never, never had he dreamed a scene like this. In the next moment Rodrigo, as he followed his father’s impatient strides toward the gate, was passed, at the Sultana Fountain, by a speeding little figure, and Don Carlos felt a pair of small, hot hands fasten on his arm.

“Oh, do me the favor, sir, of letting me go with you. I can show you exactly where I left her. She will not have gone far. She may be there yet. I know that I can find her sooner even than Rodrigo. Father! Father!”

But Don Carlos, thoroughly displeased, thrust the clinging hands away.

“We want no help of yours. Stay where you are. That is my command. If you are not old enough to understand what it means to betray a trust, at least it is time you learned obedience.”

It was midnight, and their hearts had grown heavy with dread, before they found Pilarica. The first trace they had of her was in the gypsy quarter, where the whole cave population came swarming out upon them, aroused by Xarifa’s shrill defence of the Gypsy King. He knew nothing whatever of their trumpery trash, she unblushingly declared with the little watch and chain deep in her pocket, nor did he know even by sight their nuisances of children, and he was, moreover, so sick with the misery in his bones that he had not been off his bed for seven days and nights. Rodrigo had enough to do to get his father, whose peremptory bearing only made matters worse, out of the jostling, threatening crowd before they were actually mobbed, yet he found a chance to throw a smile at a young gypsy girl whose dancing he had often admired.

“A clue, Wildrose of the Hillside! One little clue, Feet of Zephyr!” he coaxed, and Zinga, flashing him a friendly glance, pushed against him in the throng and muttered:

“There are more pearls in the Alhambra than ever the Moors dropped there.”

Acting on this doubtful hint, they had roused the indignant Don Francisco from his slumbers, and when that drowsy guardian of the old palace told them of the invasion of children that afternoon, had induced him to conduct a search for Pilarica. By the help of lanterns, for a chill rain had blown over from the Sierra Nevada, quenching the moonlight, they made their way through corridor after corridor and chamber after chamber and court after court. Don Francisco wished to shout the child’s name, but her father feared the sound might startle her out of sleep into sudden alarm, and so they pursued their anxious quest as noiselessly as might be.

“Hush!” breathed Rodrigo. He had heard, and not far off, the voice of his little sister, piping faintly:

“It’s only Big Brother,” spoke Rodrigo quietly and, stepping forward with his lantern, he turned its light on a brave little lassie cuddled in the window-recess of what had been the boudoir of a queen. She was hugging to her heart a most comforting, companionable doll, made out of a bundle of newspapers that one of the tourists had let fall. Pilarica’s wisp of a hair-ribbon was serving as a belt and the costume was completed by Rafael’s red fez. Although the child had not slept through all the long, dark hours, the shapeless doll had borne her such good company, rustling affably whenever conversation was in order, that she had forgotten to be afraid.

V

A BEAUTIFUL FEVER

PILARICA did not remember her father, and it was not without some persuasion that she consented to let the stranger carry her, while to Rodrigo was entrusted the newspaper doll, whose demeanor he pronounced quite stiff, although her intelligence was beyond dispute.

“Don’t lose the magic cap, pl—” murmured Pilarica, but for once her politeness remained incomplete, for no sooner was the silky head at rest on the broad shoulder than the exhausted child fell fast asleep. Curiously enough, the warm pressure of that nestling little body turned the thoughts of Don Carlos, for the first time since he had left the garden, to Rafael. Had he, perhaps, been too harsh with the youngster? How suddenly that first, happy look in the great eyes had been clouded with distress and shame! The boys’ mother had always been tender with them, even in their wrongdoing. And he, accustomed as he was to deal with bolts and wheels, must learn not to handle the hearts of children as if they, too, were made of iron. The father’s mood was already self-reproachful as they entered the stone kitchen, which a ruddy brasero, the Spanish fire-pan where charcoal is burned, and a savory odor of stew made cozy and homelike.

“Now praised be the Virgin of the Pillar!” cried Tia Marta, unceremoniously snatching Pilarica from Don Carlos and carrying her to the warmth of the brasero. And while Rodrigo, his vivacity unchecked by hunger and fatigue, poured forth the story of the rescue, which lost nothing in his telling, Tia Marta woke the little sleeper enough to make her swallow a cup of hot soup, undressed her, rubbed the slender body into a rosy glow and tucked her snugly away in bed. Grandfather stirred in his cot as the child was brought into the inner room and hummed a snatch of lullaby, but Rafael’s cot was empty.

Tia Marta’s squinting eyes, as she returned to the kitchen, peered into the shadows that lay beyond the flickering circle of light cast by the brasero.

“Rafael, come and get your soup and then to bed,” she called. “You must be as sleepy as the shepherds of Bethlehem.”

But no Rafael replied. Rodrigo and his father exchanged startled glances.

“Didn’t the boy come back to the house?” asked Don Carlos.

“Do you mean to say you didn’t take him with you?” demanded Tia Marta.

“Father commanded him to stop where he was,” said Rodrigo, aghast, and rushed out again into the rain, Don Carlos and Tia Marta at his heels.

They found Rafael, drenched to the skin, standing erect with folded arms beside the Sultana Fountain, a stubborn little image of obedience; but when his brother’s hand fell on his shoulder, the child reeled and fainted away. Rodrigo caught the boy just in time to save the dark head from crashing against the marble curb of the basin and, with Tia Marta’s help, carried him to the kitchen. Here they both worked over the passive form with rubbing, hot flannels and every remedy they knew, while Don Carlos, sick at heart, looked on, not venturing to touch his little son.

Rafael revived at last, but only to pass into fit after fit of convulsive crying. He lay in his brother’s arms, refusing to taste the hot soup, goat’s milk, herb tea, that, one after another, Tia Marta pressed upon him.

“But it’s peppermint tea, my angel,” she wheedled, “and peppermint is the good herb that St. Anne blessed.”

“It’s bed-time, Rafael,” pleaded Rodrigo. “Isn’t it, father? And no boy ever goes to bed without his supper.”

“Bed-time? I should think so indeed,” replied Don Carlos. “It’s quarter of two by my watch.”

At the word watch Rafael’s wild crying broke out anew.

“Do you see those tears, Don Carlos?” scolded Tia Marta, whose anxiety had to vent itself in abuse of somebody. “Tears as big as chickpeas! A house in which a child weeps such tears as those is not in the grace of God. And why, in the name of all the demons, must you be talking of watches? Such is the tact of Aragon, not of Andalusia. Oh, you Aragonese! You would speak of a rope in the house of a man that had been hanged.”

Rafael’s crying suddenly ceased. The loyal little lad sat upright on Rodrigo’s knee and turned his stained and swollen face with a certain dignity upon the old servant.

“You are not to speak to my father like that, Tia Marta,” he said. “What my father does is right.”

“Oh, the impudent little cherub!” cried Tia Marta, hugely delighted, while Don Carlos had to turn away to hide the quiver that surprised his lip.

The next day Pilarica, though she slept till noon, was as well as ever, but Rafael lay, now shaking with chills, now burning with fever, yet always wearing the rumpled red fez, which his light-headed fancies seemed to connect with the look of comprehending love in his father’s eyes.

Those first few days left little memory of their stupors and their nauseas and their pains, but when Rafael began to pay heed to life once more, he found himself thin and languid, to be sure, but the object of most gratifying attentions from the entire household. His cot had been placed—not without a pitched battle between Don Carlos and Tia Marta—under the old olive tree just before the door, and Grandfather, in his accustomed seat on the mosaic bench, had brightened up again into the best of entertainers. All this stir and excitement in the household seemed to have scattered the mists that had been creeping slowly over his brain. He was more alert than for many months and no longer played with oranges and snails. He knew his son-in-law now and while he had as many riddles in his white head as ever, he gave them out only as the children called for them. When Rafael saw that they amused his father, the boy began to hold them in higher esteem.

“They do well for girls at any time,” he confided to Rodrigo, “and for men when we are ill.” But he insisted that the answers should be guessed.

“Ask us each a riddle in turn, please, Grandfather,” he requested one marvelous Andalusian evening, when the earliest stars were pricking with gold the rich purple of the sky, “and I will pronounce the forfeits for those who fail.”

“With whom do I begin?” asked Grandfather.

“With my father, of course,” responded Rafael.

“No, no, my son. Always the ladies first,” corrected Don Carlos, drawing Pilarica to his side.

“Then it is Tia Marta who begins, for she is bigger than I am, and so she must be more of a lady,” observed Pilarica wisely.

Just then the five-minute evening peal from the old Watch-Tower rang out, and Grandfather, turning to Tia Marta, recited:

“Bah!” ejaculated Tia Marta. “As if I had not known that ever since I could suck sugarcane! To ask a church-bell riddle of one who was born on the top of the Giralda!”

sang Grandfather roguishly, strumming on his guitar.

“But this fiddling old grasshopper is enough to set the blood of St. Patience on fire,” snapped Tia Marta, who had been standing in the doorway and now indignantly popped back into her kitchen.

“Did Tia Marta ring the bells when she was a teenty tinty baby?” asked Pilarica.

“Not just that,” replied Don Carlos, who was seated in the hammock that he had swung beside Rafael’s cot in order to care for the sick boy at night, “but it is true that she was born high up in the Giralda, which, as she may have told you, is the beautiful old Moorish minaret, that looks as if it were wrought of rose-colored lace, close by the glorious cathedral of Seville. There are thirty bells in this tower and they all have names. One is Saint Mary, I remember, and one Saint Peter, and one The Fat Lady, and one The Sweet Singer. Tia Marta can tell you all the rest, for she spent the first seventeen years of her life among them, way up above the roofs of the city. The hawks that build their nests even higher, under the gilded wings of the crowning statue of Faith, used to drop their black feathers at her feet and she would wear them in her hair when she came down to the festivals of Seville. She was a wonderful dancer in those days, I have heard your grandfather say.”

“Ay, that she was,” chimed in the old man, speaking with unwonted animation. “I can see her now in her yellow skirt spangled all over with furbelows, wearing her wreath of red poppies with the best, while her little feet would twinkle to the clicking of the castanets.”

“But how did she happen to grow so old and ugly?” asked Rafael.

“Oh, Rafael!” exclaimed Pilarica, shocked by such unmannerly frankness.

“Very nobly,” answered Don Carlos, stroking his little daughter’s hair. “By love and by service. When her father, the bell-ringer, died, and a stranger took his rooms in the Giralda, Marta came down into the city and entered the home of your grandfather and sainted grandmother—”

“May God rejoice her soul with the light of Paradise!” murmured Grandfather devoutly.

“There Marta was nurse-maid for your mother, then a little witch two or three years old,” continued Don Carlos. “And she grew so fond of her charge that she never left her, not even when your mother had the infinite goodness to marry me, and we moved to Cadiz, my naval station then. And now Tia Marta, for your mother’s blessed sake, spends all her strength and devotion upon you. We must never forget what we owe her, and we must always treat her with respect and affection.”

Rodrigo, who was pacing the tiled walks near by, trying to puzzle out a mathematical problem, turned to say:

“I’ll bring her a cherry ribbon from Granada to-morrow.”

“And she may wash my ears as hard as she likes,” magnanimously declared Rafael.

But Pilarica slipped from within the circle of her father’s arm and ran into the house to surprise Tia Marta with a sudden squeeze and shower of kisses.

By the time the little girl came out again, Grandfather had a riddle for her:

As the child hesitated, Rodrigo pointed to the luminous horizon, and she promptly said: “The Moon.”

“But that’s not playing fair,” protested Rafael.

“Oh, we don’t expect girls to play fair,” laughed his brother.

“But I want to play fair,” urged Pilarica. “And I want to be punished, like Rafael, when I do wrong. Why wasn’t it just as bad in me to disobey Tia Marta and run off with the Alhambra children as it was in Rafael to leave me alone?”

“It’s hard to explain, Sugarplum,” said her father, “but the world expects certain things of a man, courage and faithfulness and honor, and a boy is in training for manhood.”

“And what is a girl in training for?” asked Pilarica.

“To be amiable and charming,” answered Rodrigo promptly.

“But I want to be faithful and hon’able, too,” persisted Pilarica.

“A man must do his duty,” declared Don Carlos, slowly and earnestly. “That is what manliness means. He must satisfy his conscience. But it is enough for a little girl if she content her father’s heart, as my darling contents mine. And when the years shall bring you a husband, then he will be your conscience.”

“But I want a conscience of my own,” pouted Pilarica. “And I do not want a husband at all. If I must grow up, I will be a nun and make sweetmeats.”

“Time enough to change your mind,” scoffed Rodrigo. “What is my riddle, Grandfather?”

“Wait till my father has had his turn,” jealously interposed Rafael.

Grandfather was all ready:

“But this is difficult,” groaned Don Carlos, thinking so hard that the hammock creaked.

“I know,” cooed Pilarica. “Grandfather told it to me once before.”

“Don’t give my father a hint,” warned Rafael.

“But Rodrigo gave me a hint,” returned Pilarica.

“Oh, that’s different,” declared Rodrigo, almost impatiently. “Men must play fair.”

But it was some time before Don Carlos found the right answer, “Night”; and Rodrigo had almost as much trouble in guessing his.

He called out “Firefly” only just in time to escape a forfeit, but Rafael, to whom fell the puzzle:

quickly guessed “Stars.”

He could hardly help it, with such a shining company of them shedding their gracious looks down upon the garden.

“How many stars are there, Grandfather?” he asked.

“One thousand and seven,” replied Grandfather, “except on Holy Night, the blessed Christmas Eve, when there flashes out one more, brightest of all, the Star of Bethlehem.”

“That is your Andalusian arithmetic,” laughed Don Carlos, shaking his head. “They say in Galicia that a man should not try to count the stars, lest he come to have as many wrinkles as the number of stars he has counted.”

“Where’s Galicia?” asked Pilarica.

“Far from here, in the northwest corner of Spain,” answered Don Carlos, more gravely than seemed necessary. “My sister—your Aunt Barbara—lives there, and one of these days I am going to tell you more of her, and of her husband, your Uncle Manuel, and of your Cousin Dolores, who is a year or two younger than Rodrigo. They are the only kindred we have in the world.”

Even Rodrigo wondered at the sudden seriousness in Don Carlos’ tone, but Grandfather, at that moment, chanted another riddle, which, as it turned out, nobody could guess, not even Tia Marta, who had come to the doorway again.

Grandfather finally had to tell them the answer, “Darkness,” and then Rafael assigned to everybody a forfeit. Tia Marta was sent into the house after a treat, which, for Rafael’s own forfeit, he was not to taste; Pilarica danced, Rodrigo vaulted over the cot, and Don Carlos was begged to “tell about the heroes of Spain.”

“To-morrow,” said the father, taking Rafael’s wrist in his cool fingers and counting the pulse. “You have had quite enough talking for to-night, my son.”

And then the English consul, whose home was on the Alhambra hill, dropped in, just as Tia Marta was passing around—but not to Rafael—the most delicious cinnamon paste whose secret she had learned from the nuns in Seville. The consul shook hands with Don Carlos and Rodrigo, patted Pilarica’s head, complimented Tia Marta on the paste, and then bent over Rafael’s cot.

“So you have been having a fever, my little man?” he said.

“Oh, such a beautiful fever!” sighed Rafael blissfully, snuggling his face against his father’s coat sleeve.

“But how is that?” queried the consul in surprise.

“It’s the red cap,” volunteered Pilarica. “It doesn’t exactly turn real stones into real bread, but it makes trouble pleasant, and that’s the same thing, only better.”

The Englishman did not look much enlightened.

VI

HEROES AND DONKEYS

ON the morrow Don Carlos was promptly called upon to redeem his forfeit. Rafael was so much better that he had been lifted over to his father’s hammock, where, propped against pillows, he sat almost upright, taking, for the first time since his illness began, his usual breakfast of chocolate and bread. Pilarica, in celebration of this happy event, had waited to breakfast with him, and the two children were having great fun, throwing back their heads in unison as they dipped the long strips of bread into their bowls of cinnamon-flavored chocolate, so thick that it clung to the bread in a sticky lump. They were very dexterous in whirling up the bread-sticks and directing the sluggish brown trickle into their mouths without spilling a drop, afterwards biting off the chocolate-laden end of the bread and hungrily dipping again.

“And now for the heroes!” called Rafael.

“You didn’t say please,” rebuked Pilarica.

“Heroes, please,” amended the boy, “but girls ought not to correct their brothers.”

“Do me the favor to excuse me,” apologized Pilarica.

“There is no occasion for it,” returned Rafael with his best Andalusian manner.

“A thousand thanks,” responded Pilarica. And now that this series of polite phrases, taught in every Spanish nursery, was duly accomplished, Rafael called again for the heroes.

“One at a time,” responded the father, throwing out his hands with a gesture of playful remonstrance. He had just come back from his morning walk with Rodrigo, whom he liked to accompany for at least a part of the way to the Institute, and was warm from the return climb. “One hero a day, like one breakfast a day, is quite enough for Don Anybody.”

Then he told them stories of a champion who was mighty in Spain eight hundred years ago.

“If I were one hundred times as old as I am,” cried Rafael with sparkling eyes, “perhaps I would have seen him.”

“Perhaps,” smiled Don Carlos, and went on to tell the children that this warrior’s name was the name of their own brother, Rodrigo, though he had other names, too, as Ruy Diaz de Bivar, and was most often called the Cid, or Lord, a title given him by the five Moorish kings whom he conquered all at once.

“Five—Moorish—kings!” exclaimed Rafael in rapture, while Pilarica, to help her imagination, propped up five tawny breadsticks in a row.

So their father told them how the Cid, when a stripling not twenty summers old, had ridden forth on his fiery horse, Bavieca, followed by a troop of youthful friends, against those five royal Moors who, with a great army, were plundering Castile, and how he overthrew them and set their host of Christian captives free.

“Our Rodrigo would have done that, too,” declared Rafael proudly, while Pilarica, with one valiant dab of her forefinger, tumbled the five bread-sticks into the dust. Later, remembering Tia Marta, she picked them up and polished them off with a handful of rose-petals before restoring them to the plate.

Finding his hero so popular, Don Carlos recited what he could remember of an old Spanish ballad that tells of the Cid’s offer to give Bavieca to the King of Castile.

Rafael’s mind was still full of the Cid when, two or three days later, he was well enough to take a short ride on Shags outside the garden. The rough-coated, mouse-colored donkey carried his young master jauntily, being apparently well pleased to see him out again. Don Carlos, racking his memory for more ballads of the Cid, was walking beside Shags, when Pilarica, who had tripped on ahead and turned a corner, uttered a cry of distress. The father sprang forward and found the child on her knees in the dust of the highway, her face streaming with tears, while she held up her clasped hands in entreaty to a sullen-faced fellow who was brutally beating his ass. The poor creature, hardly more than skin and bones, was so cruelly overladen with sacks of charcoal that he had stumbled on a steep and stony bit of the road and broken the fastenings of one of the sacks, whose contents were merrily making off downhill like little black imps on a holiday. The peasant, in a fury, was dealing the ass great fisticuffs on the tender nose, and between the eyes, shut in patient endurance of the blows.

Don Carlos had often seen animals beaten and had usually passed by with a shrug of annoyance, but the anguish of pity in his little daughter’s face and attitude suddenly smote him with an intolerable feeling, as if that horny fist were pounding his own heart.

“Hold, there, my friend!” he protested. “Enough is as good as a feast. If you kill your donkey, who will carry the load?”

The charcoal seller, his arm raised for another blow, stared in astonishment at the speaker.

“You would do well to put your tongue in your pocket,” he growled. “This ass is mine, to beat if I choose and to kill if I choose. I am thinking that is what I will do, for his skin is the best of him now.”

Pilarica rose and rushed to her father, her eyes their deepest pansy purple with beseeching.

“Oh, dearest father, if you please! If you would kindly do me the favor! Instead of the doll with golden hair, if only you would give me this sweet, beautiful donkey!”

Her father lifted her in his arms, so that the flushed, wet face was pressed against his own.

“Do you mean it, Honeydrop? Think again. Do you really wish me to buy you this wretched ass in place of the wonderful dolly with Paris clothes, in the Granada shop? I am afraid there is not money enough for both.”

“Oh, yes, yes!” entreated Pilarica. “The doll is happy in the shop-window, where she can see the children smile at her as they go by, but the donkey—oh, father, the donkey!”

The peasant, whose arm had fallen to his side and who had been listening shrewdly, now stepped forward, touching his hat with a surly civility.

“It’s not for the price of a basket of cabbages I would be selling my fine donkey. I’m a poor man, your Worship. All that God has given me for my portion in the world is morning and evening, three pennyworths of poverty, and a bushel of children with the gullets of sharks. What would become of us all without my strong, good ass?”

“I’ll give you two dollars for your dingy old rattlebones, my man, and that is twice what anybody else would be fool enough to give you,” said Don Carlos, holding out the coins.

The charcoal-seller looked at them greedily, but still hung back.

“Come, now!” spoke Don Carlos sharply. “Don’t stand hesitating like a grasshopper that wants to jump and doesn’t know where. Remember that covetousness bursts the bag. Is it a bargain or not?”

The decision of the officer’s tone and, still more, the tempting gleam of the silver prevailed, but the peasant would not give over his donkey until he had delivered the load of charcoal. So Don Carlos and Pilarica, Rafael and Shags, escorted Sooty-Face and his limping ass to the hotel hard by the Alhambra, where the sale was at last effected.

“And now the donkey, such as he is, is yours,” said Don Carlos, putting the shabby bridle into Pilarica’s hand. “Haven’t you a smile for me now?”

But the child, though she kissed her father gratefully, flung her arms about the donkey’s neck, and, pressing her cheek to the bruised nose, cried harder than ever, until Shags felt it time to interfere. That generous-minded animal, whose long ears had been responding, with various cocks and tremors, to every stage of the proceedings, now drowned Pilarica’s sobs in a resounding bray. The stranger seemed to understand this greeting better than he understood Pilarica’s endearments and took a timid step or two toward his new comrade.

“Shall we call him Bavieca?” asked Rafael, eying the sorry beast doubtfully. He certainly did small credit to the name of the peerless steed.

“Better call him Rosinante,” laughed the father, “after the forlorn old horse of Don Quixote, who was something of a hero, too, in his way. Most people, as, for instance, his fat squire, Sancho Panza, who rode a famous ass named Dapple, thought it a very foolish way.”

“Why?” questioned Pilarica, whisking off her tears with the ends of her hair-ribbon.

“Oh, he took windmills for giants, and wayside inns for castles, and flocks of sheep for armies. He rode through the country trying to right wrongs and only got knocked about and made fun of for his pains. In fact, this coming to the rescue of an abused donkey is something after his fashion.”

And Don Carlos, a little shame-faced, looked his purchase over. The ass was lame in one foot, covered with welts and fly-bites, and so weak that he seemed hardly able to walk even now that his load had been removed. But Pilarica was enchanted with him and kept lavishing caresses upon the gaunt beast, whose large, liquid eyes looked out wonderingly at her.

“I want to call him Don Quixote,” she announced. “I think Don Quixote is a lovely hero, and this is such a lovely, lovely donkey.”

“Very well!” assented her father, with a shrug. “At any rate, he’s lean enough. And now to see what Tia Marta will have to say to this performance of ours!”

But Tia Marta unexpectedly took Don Quixote to her heart. As the ass stood before her for inspection, hanging his head as if aware of his unsightliness, and now and then slowly shaking his drooped ears, she surveyed him for a moment, her squinting eyes taking account of all the marks of cruel usage, and then stamped her foot in anger.

“That charcoal-seller ought to be thrashed like wheat,” she cried. “How I wish I had the drubbing of him! I would like to split him in two like a pomegranate. But God knows the truth, and let it rest there. And this donkey is not so bad a bargain, Don Carlos. See what I will make of him, with food and rest and ointment. The blessed ass of Bethlehem, he who warmed with his breath the Holy Babe in the manger and bore Our Lady of Mercy on his back to Egypt, could have no better care from me than I will spend on this maltreated innocent.”

Tia Marta was as good as her word. Her choicest balsams were brought to bear upon the donkey’s hurts, and Leandro, whom Rodrigo asked over to see the animal, for gypsies are wise in such matters, agreed with the old woman that the ass was of good stock and might have, under decent conditions, years of service in him yet. When the charcoal stains were washed away and the discoloration of the bruises had faded out, the discovery was made, to Pilarica’s ecstasy, that Don Quixote was a white donkey. Oh, to possess a plump white donkey! The child was in such haste to see those scarecrow outlines rounded out that Tia Marta grew extravagant and added handfuls of barley to the regular rations of chopped straw. And as it would never do to feed the new-comer better than the faithful Shags, that Long-Ears, too, found his fare improved, so that, with a chum to share his cellar and a festival dinner every day, he waxed fat and frisky and often sang, as best he could, his resonant psalm of life.

Pilarica went carolling like a bird through the old garden in those blithe spring mornings, and Rafael had grown so vigorous that he was again more than a match for her at their favorite game of Titirinela. The children would clasp hands, brace their feet together until the tips of Rafael’s sandals strained against his sister’s, fling their small bodies back as far as the length of their arms would allow, and then spin around and around like a giddy top, singing responsively:

Once, as Don Carlos came to pick up his little daughter, after the whirling top had broken in two and each half had rolled laughing on the ground, Pilarica clasped her arms tight about his neck, exclaiming:

“Dearest father, are we not the very happiest people in all the world!”

But he hastily thrust an official-looking envelope into his pocket and, for his only answer, shut the shining eyes with kisses.

VII

THE GEOGRAPHY GENTLEMAN

RAFAEL woke three times that night and put out his hand to his father’s hammock, only to find it empty. Listening intently, he would hear measured steps pacing up and down at the further end of the garden. The third time, he ventured to call, and the steps quickened their beat and came toward him.

“Anything amiss, my son?” asked Don Carlos, stooping over the cot.

“I keep waking up and missing you,” confessed Rafael, half ashamed. “Isn’t it very late?”

“Yes, or very early, as one may like to call it,” answered Don Carlos, looking to the east, where a pearly gleam was already stealing up the sky. “But I will turn in now, if your rest depends on mine. A youngster like you should make but one sleep of it the whole night long, and not lie with eyes as wide open as a rabbit’s.”

The next morning Tia Marta noticed that Don Carlos had a haggard look and that, when he returned from his walk with Rodrigo, his face was grave and anxious.

“The master’s furlough must be nearly up,” she remarked to the cat, with whom she was in the habit of holding long conversations, “or he worries about the new conscription, fearing for the señorito. But it is not our bonny Rodrigo who would draw a lot for the soldiering. He is ever the son of good-luck. And yet—ah, well! well! Each man sneezes as God pleases. As for you and me, Roxa, we will not be troubling the master with questions. Some broths are the worse for stirring.”

When Don Carlos, however, came upon Rafael and Pilarica running races in the garden, his bearing was so gay that they mischievously barred his passage, standing across the walk, hand in hand, and singing:

As they suited the action to the words, he bent and lightly knocked the black heads together, saying merrily:

“What a pity that nobody wants to spend the day with me in Granada!”

“A whole day!”

“In Granada!”

And the madcaps, wild with glee, flashed about the fragrant garden more swiftly than the swallows, whose chirurrí, chirurrí, chicurrí, Beatriiiiíz, Pilarica mocked so truly that her father could not always tell which was child and which was bird.

“What, what, gentlemen! What, what, what! What, what, ladies! What, what, what! As the old duck quacks when the barnyard gets too lively,” called Grandfather, who was trimming one of the boxwood hedges. Even his physical energies seemed to have been somewhat restored in these three eventful weeks since Don Carlos had come home.

“Save your strength, you little spendthrifts,” bade their father. “It’s a long road to Granada, and a longer road back. And now run to Tia Marta to be made fine.”

“May Shags go with us?” shouted Rafael.

“And Don Quixote, please,” begged Pilarica.

“Not all the way,” replied Don Carlos, “but Grandfather, if he will be so kind, may bring the donkeys to meet us at the Gate of the Pomegranates an hour before sundown.”

“With much pleasure,” assented Grandfather, while the children scampered off to be arrayed in their simple best.

Such a joyous day as it was! They walked down slowly, with frequent rests, in which Don Carlos would tell them still more stories of the Cid, and of Bernardo del Carpio, the valiant knight who loved his father even better than he loved his country.

“And so do I,” said Rafael shyly, and Don Carlos, though he shook his head, pinched the square chin, so like his own, and did not look displeased. But at their next rest he began to tell them what a glorious history their country had,—how the Spanish Peninsula, after the Romans, once masters of the world, had occupied and ruled it for nearly seven centuries, was possessed by the Goths, one of the wild, free races from the north of Europe that poured down upon the sunny southern lands and wrested them from the grasp of Rome, then weakened by luxury and unable to resist.

“But this does not interest Pilarica,” the speaker interrupted himself to say. “There are flowers over yonder, Honey Heart, that you might run and gather.”

“Oh, but I love it!” protested the little girl, all her face aglow. “I can just see the Goths rushing down from the top of the world, and the lazy Romans looking so surprised while their countries are taken away from them.”

“Huh!” snorted Rafael. “I don’t see any such thing. Do be quiet, Pilarica, while my father tells me what happened next.”

“Something more than two centuries of Gothic rule, which was Christian rule, happened next,” continued Don Carlos, “and then the Moors, followers of the false prophet Mohammed, swarmed over from Africa and drove the Christians back and back, till even stout little Galicia, which made a stubborn resistance up in its far corner, was conquered. It was feared that the Mohammedans would pass the Pyrenees, that majestic mountain range which shuts off our Peninsula from the rest of Europe, and overrun all Christendom, and it is the supreme service of Spain to civilization, her crowning honor and her holiest pride, that in this crisis of destiny she saved Europe from the Moslems. Against that dark tide of invasion, checked by the mountain bar, she flung the fighting force of all her chivalry, and little by little, century by century, the armies of the Cross forced the armies of the Crescent southward, drenching all the way with blood, until at last, at last, under our great wedded sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moors were driven out even from their last stronghold in the Peninsula, from Granada, and sent flying back across the Straits.”

In the fervor of his feeling, Don Carlos had risen and swept off his hat, as if in the presence of that august Spain whose heroic past he was relating. Pilarica’s slender arms were extended to help in pushing out the Moors. Rafael, breathing hard, was the first to speak.

“Oh-h! I am so glad to be a Spaniard.”

“And well you may be,” said Don Carlos, holding out his hand to Pilarica for resuming the walk. “Not only does Europe owe, perhaps, her very existence as a Christian continent to Spain, but it was through the faith and practical support of Queen Isabella that the Italian adventurer, Columbus, was enabled to cross the vast, unknown Atlantic and discover America.”

“Are not Europe and America very grateful to us?” asked Pilarica, as she tripped along by her father’s side, taking three steps to his one.

“Of course they are,” Rafael took it upon himself to answer. “Isn’t that a silly question, father? But Pilarica is only a girl.”

“Queen Isabella, who did such wonderful things for Spain and the world, was only a girl once,” remarked Pilarica.

Rafael pretended not to hear.

Their father brought them first to the stately cathedral of Granada. Here, in the Royal Chapel, all three stood silent for a moment above the dim vault where rest in peace the ashes of Ferdinand and Isabella. Then he took them to the magnificent promenade, the Alameda, along whose sides tower rows of giant trees that throw an emerald arch across the avenue. Here fountains were playing, roses, myrtles and jessamines were in rich bloom, and there were dazzling glimpses of the snow-robed Sierra Nevada. But when the little feet began to lag under the noontide heat, Don Carlos led the children to a neighboring square and, pausing before one of the tallest houses, reached his arm through the iron bars of the outer door and twitched a bell-chain that was looped within.

“Who comes?” called a voice from above, as in the old times of warfare between Christian and Moor.

“Peace,” answered Don Carlos, and in a moment both doors swung wide.

A little old man came hurrying across the marble court to meet them. His head was covered by a close-fitting red silk cap, his eyes were two black twinkles, and his face was yellow as an orange.

“It’s the Geography Gentleman,” whispered Rafael to Pilarica, while their host was greeting Don Carlos. “I met him once when I was walking with Rodrigo and he gave me macaroons.”

“And you have brought your cherubs, as I begged you,” twittered the Geography Gentleman, pecking at Pilarica’s cheeks. “And how are you called, my sweeting?”

“Maria Pilar Catalina Isabel Teresa Mariana Moreto y Hernandez, at the service of God and yourself,” responded the child, demurely kissing the clawlike hand and smiling trustfully into the queer yellow face so near her own.

“Aha! So our Lady of the Pillar has you under her protection, and Catalina is for your mother, whom I knew before she was as tall as you are now—ah, white pearl among the souls in Paradise!—and the other names?”

“Are for the great queen whose tomb I have just taken her to see and for her sponsors in baptism,” explained Don Carlos.

“Good, good! And this is Rafael, an old friend of mine, though so young. Aha, ha, ha! And now you children are wondering why I keep my cap on in the house, and that, too, when it is honored by the presence of a little ladybird. It is not because I am such a good Spaniard that I must always wear the red with the yellow; not that, not that. It is because I am bald, like St. Peter. Did you never hear it said that a silent man is as badly off for words as St. Peter for hair? I will teach you a verse about him:

“But you are hot; you are tired; you are well-nigh slain by that enemy, the sun. Come and rest! Come and rest! The house is yours. All that it holds is yours. Come and rest!”

It seemed to the awed children that their house held a great deal, as they followed the Geography Gentleman, to whom their father had offered his arm. First he led them to the central court, an Andalusian patio, open to the air, with violet-bordered fountain, with graceful palms and, planted in urns, small, sweet-blossoming trees. Then their adventurous sandals climbed a wide marble stairway and pattered on over the tiled floors from chamber to chamber out to a shaded balcony. Pilarica and Rafael were less impressed by the Moorish arches and windows, the delight of foreign visitors, than by objects less familiar to their eyes,—statues, pictures, tapestried walls, curtained bedsteads, hanging lamps and, strangest of all the strange, an American rocking-chair.

A smiling maid came in, bearing a silver pitcher and basin, and the children bathed their faces and hands in the cool, rose-scented water, but when the maid offered them the embroidered towel of fine linen she carried on her arm, Pilarica drew back in dismay.

“But we would get it wet,” she objected.

Nobody laughed, although the black eyes of the Geography Gentleman twinkled more brightly than ever. Don Carlos stepped forward and held over the basin his own hands, on which the maid poured a fresh stream from the pitcher. Then he dried his hands upon the towel and passed it to Pilarica, who, though still reluctant, ventured to use one end, while Rafael, at the same time, plunged his dripping face into the other.

The luncheon, it seemed to the little guests, was a repast fit for heroes, even for the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio,—a cold soup like a melted salad, a perfumed stew in which were strangely mingled Malaga potatoes, white wine, honey, cinnamon and cloves, and, for a crowning bliss, a dish of sugared chestnuts overflowed by a syrup whose every spoonful yielded a new flavor,—lemon peel, orange peel, tamarind, and a medley of spices.

After luncheon everybody, in true Spanish fashion, took a nap, the Geography Gentleman in one of the hushed chambers, and Don Carlos in another, but the children slept far more soundly on couches in adjoining balconies, though over Pilarica’s slumber two canaries in a gilded cage were chirping drowsily about their family affairs, and a bright green parrot, chained to a perch, did his best to waken Rafael by screaming for bread and butter.

VIII

ONLY A GIRL

PILARICA and Rafael were finally aroused from the siesta by a commotion in the square. Peeping over the queerly twisted iron railing of the balconies, they saw many women, in the bright-hued costume of Andalusian peasants, surging by in stormy groups, talking wildly and making violent gestures. Then came a dozen lads of about Rodrigo’s age, locked arm in arm and chorusing in time to their swinging tread:

The children looked and wondered for a while, and then, as they had been bidden, went down to the patio.

Don Carlos and his host were smoking there together and talking so earnestly that they did not notice the light footfalls.

“No, if it comes to that, I shall not buy him off,” Don Carlos was saying. “He must take his chance with the rest of the eighty thousand whom Spain has flung like acorns into Cuba.”

“My own three sons among them, my gentle José, my fearless Adolfo, my merry Celestino,” moaned the old man, rocking himself to and fro like one in bodily pain. “My money can do nothing for them now—my gallant boys!—but if you would accept from an old friend, for the comfort of his lonely heart, the thousand pesetas—”

“Thanks upon thanks, most honored sir, but no, no!” interrupted Don Carlos, laying his hand upon the other’s arm, while his voice deepened with emotion. “If you, one of the wealthiest of the Granadines, were too loyal a patriot to buy off your sons from military service, shall I, who wear the uniform, hold back my own?”

“Ah, but my lads would not be bought off, though when it came to Adolfo, I consented, and when it came to Celestino, I besought. They were all for adventure and for seeing the world. They had lived among my globes and maps too long. Woe is me! Woe is me!”

Tears were streaming down the yellow face of the Geography Gentleman, and Pilarica could not bear the sight. She ran forward and, leaning against his knee, reached up and tried to wipe the tears away with her tiny handkerchief.

“Oho, oho!” he chirped, changing his manner at once. “Here is our Linnet wide awake again! What now? What now? A fairy story, shall it be? That’s what little girls like—stories of the fairies and the saints.”

“I would rather, if you please, hear about Cuba,” replied Pilarica, nestling close to those trembling knees. “What is it, and why does Spain drop people into it like acorns?”

Rafael, standing close beside his father, felt him start as if to check the childish questions, but already the Geography Gentleman was rising, not without difficulty, from his carven chair.

“Ugh!” he groaned. “My poor bones creak like a Basque cart. But no matter! As for the old, they may sing sorrow. Come with me to my study, all of you, all of you, and we will find out what Cuba looks like. Ah, Cuba, Cuba, Cuba!”

Don Carlos tried again to protest, but the Geography Gentleman would have his way. So he led them to a room unlike anything that the children had ever seen before. Great globes swung in their standards, maps lined the walls, a desk with many pigeon-holes stood near a huge brasero, and everywhere were cases of books. Rafael hung back in bewilderment, but Pilarica kept close to their guide and watched with eager eyes while he gave the largest globe a twirl.

“Did you know the world was round?” he asked. “And that there is a red-haired goblin who sits in the center and holds on to our feet so we shan’t tumble off? When he yawns, it gives us an earthquake. A good old fellow, that, but he has too long a name for such little pink ears as yours.”

“My ears are larger,” suggested Rafael.

“And Shags and Don Quixote have the largest ears of all,” added Pilarica, and then blushed to see that even her father smiled, while the Geography Gentleman gurgled and wheezed until his yellow face was streaked with purple.

“Good! good! good!” he squeaked, as soon as he could muster even so much voice again. “The goblin’s name is Gravitation, and he sits all doubled up, with his long nose gripped between his knees, pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling, till his arms are almost ripped out of his shoulders, but not quite. For though he’s uglier than hunger, he’s stronger than the sun and the moon.”

The child gazed doubtfully at the big globe.

“Will you please open it and show him to me?”

Again the Geography Gentleman fell to laughing until he had to hold his aching sides.

“But do you think I have wind-mills in my head that I talk such a monstrous heap of nonsense?” he asked. “It is only that pretty little ladies like nonsense better than sense. No, I cannot open my globe for you, dainty one, but see! I can show you Spain.”

But Pilarica’s faith in the Geography Gentleman was shaken.

“Spain is not blue,” she objected, looking critically at the color of the patch beneath his thumb. And even while he pointed out Andalusia in the south, with its Moorish cities of Granada and Seville and Cordova, and the port of Cadiz; and Castile, occupying the middle of the Peninsula, with its ancient city of Toledo and its royal city of Madrid; and her father’s native province of Aragon to the northeast, with Saragossa, the home of his boyhood, still Pilarica’s air was so skeptical as to throw the lecturer into frequent convulsions of mirth.

“But where is the basket,—the big basket that Spain flings acorns into?” she questioned.

This, again, was too much for the Geography Gentleman, and while he was gasping and choking, Don Carlos came to his little daughter’s aid.

“Cuba is an island,” he explained, “the largest of the West Indian islands and almost all that is left to Spain of her once vast American possessions. One by one, the lands she had discovered and claimed—you remember about Queen Isabella and Columbus—rebelled against her, or otherwise slipped from her hold, and even now there is a revolt in Cuba that has already cost Spain dear in life and treasure.”

“And if the Yankees take a hand in the game,” put in their host, “may cost us Cuba herself.”

“What are Yankees?” asked Rafael, frowning quite terribly at this suggestion.

“The most powerful nation in America,” replied Don Carlos, “a nation that threatens to go to war with us, if the trouble in Cuba continues much longer.”

“They must be very wicked people,” declared Rafael with flashing eyes.

“No, my son; they are much like the rest of the world,” answered his father, quietly. “I have met a few of them, but not to know them well, for they did not understand Spanish.”

“Not understand Spanish!” exclaimed Pilarica. “Then at least they must be very stupid, for Spanish even the donkeys understand!”

This reproach set the Geography Gentleman off again, and his sides were still shaking as he pointed out Cuba on the globe.

And now all Pilarica’s gathering suspicions of the science of geography were confirmed.

“But if Cuba belongs to Spain, who put it there close to America?” she asked. “Did the Yankees make that globe and put it there themselves?”

And once more the Geography Gentleman laughed till the close-fitting cap fell off and showed his shining bald head.

“ ‘Honey is not for the mouth of an ass,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and learning is not for women.’ But what a pity, Don Carlos, that this child is only a girl! Her wits run bright as the quicksilver fountain that used to sparkle in the royal garden of Seville.”

“She is like Rodrigo, keen as a Toledo blade,” assented Don Carlos. “It is this youngster,” drawing Rafael closer to him, “who has the slow brains of his father.”

“Slow and sure often wins the race,” said the old teacher, turning kind eyes on Rafael. “He will make a scholar when the time comes, and it should come soon now. Will you not enter him in the lower school next year? He may not be the mathematical wonder that his brother is, taking prizes as naturally as other lads bite off ripe mulberries, but if his father’s steadfastness of purpose has descended to him with his father’s chin, he will do well in the world. Character is better than talent. But this rosebud brings back to me her mother, who used to coax and coax me, when she was the merest midget, to teach her to read my books. Her parents spent several summers in Granada and, if they had consented, I would have liked to see what a girl’s head could do. But of course they would not hear of it. She was taught to dance and to embroider, only that. Her mind went hungry. But bless my heart! Such talk as this is not meal for chickens. A penny for your thoughts, my sober little man!”

“I was thinking about Spain,” answered Rafael, who all this time had been glowering at the globe. “How did we lose what was ours? Were there no more great kings after Ferdinand?”

“Yes,” said Don Carlos. “Spain has had strong kings and weak kings, wise and foolish, but even the best of them blundered at times. Ferdinand and Isabella themselves made mistakes. So some thirty years ago, when I was a boy, Spain tried to be a republic and get on without any king at all, but she did not prosper so.”

“King Alfonsito is not much older than I am,” murmured Rafael, with a wondering look in his great dark eyes.

“And a gallant child it is! A right royal child!” chirruped the Geography Gentleman.

“God bless him and grant him a long and righteous reign!” added Don Carlos, so solemnly that Pilarica clasped her hands as if she were saying her prayers.

“His father, King Alfonso XII, had a great heart,” the Geography Gentleman said musingly, “but his heart was wrung to breaking by sore troubles. I was in Madrid when the young Queen Mercedes died. Woe is me! What a grief was his!”

“Pilarica knows a song about that,” observed Rafael.

“Ah, to be sure! Spanish babies all over the Peninsula dance to that sorrow,” nodded the Geography Gentleman. “Come back into the patio, where the fountain will sing with her, and let us have it.”

So in the fragrant air of the patio, where an awning had been drawn to shut off the direct rays of the sun, Pilarica, dancing with strange, slow movements of feet and hands, sang childhood’s lament for the girl-queen.

“And now we must be taking our leave, with a thousand thanks for a red-letter day,” said Don Carlos.

“But no, no, no!” cried the Geography Gentleman. “Not until you have tasted a little light refreshment to wing your feet for the Alhambra hill. We will go up to the balcony and see Lorito—the wasteful rumple-poll that he is—enjoy his bread and butter.”

It was very pleasant on the balcony, with its pots of sweet basil, its earthen jar of fresh water and its caged cricket “singing the song of the heat.” The gentlemen were regaled with wine and biscuit, the children with candied nectarines and tarts, and to Lorito the maid respectfully handed a great slice of bread, thickly buttered. The square was quiet again, though from the Alameda came confused sounds, as of an angry crowd, cut by shrill outcries. A few beggars were gathered beneath the balcony, waiting for the bread which Lorito, after scraping off every least bit of the butter with his crooked beak, tore into strips and threw down to them, dancing on his perch and screaming with excitement to see them scramble for it.

This amused the children so much that they could hardly recall the proper Andalusian phrases for farewell. But their host, loving the ripple of their laughter, found nothing lacking in their courtesy and, at parting, slipped into Pilarica’s hand a dainty white Andalusian fan, painted with birds and flowers, and into Rafael’s a small geography, written by himself. Rafael was deeply impressed at receiving this, the first book he had ever owned, from its author, and carried it, on their homeward walk, in such a way that no learned person who might meet them could fail to see what it was.

“Of course nobody would give a geography to a girl,” he remarked.

“Maybe your geography isn’t true,” retorted Pilarica, flirting her fan. “But look, look! There is Grandfather with the donkeys, and Rodrigo is waiting for us, too.”

Don Carlos, who had his own reasons for wishing to see what Don Quixote was able to do, placed both the children on the white donkey’s back, leaving Shags for Grandfather to ride, and Don Quixote acquitted himself so well that he, with his double burden, was the first to arrive at the garden gate. Shags, trotting for sheer surprise, was close behind, but it was half an hour later before Don Carlos and Rodrigo came slowly up the road, the father’s arm thrown lightly over the lad’s shoulders.

IX

CHOSEN FOR THE KING

THE next morning, as Don Carlos was starting off, as usual, with Rodrigo, Rafael clung to his father’s hand.

The officer who, since that first unhappy night, seemed to have a complete understanding of the boy, hesitated.

“But I may walk all the way into Granada with your brother to-day and may not come back until afternoon. You know how tired you were yesterday by the time we reached the Gate of the Pomegranates.”

Rafael’s black eyes looked wistfully into his father’s.

“I would rather go with you and be tired than not go with you and not be tired,” he said.

Don Carlos smiled so tenderly that Rafael had a queer feeling as if his heart were growing too big for his jacket.

“You may come, my son,” decided the father, and then his glance fell doubtfully on Pilarica. “No, the city will be in tumult; no place for a little girl. But you may walk a bit of the way with us, Sweetheart.”

It seemed such a very wee bit that, when her father kissed her and bade her run back, the tears stood in Pilarica’s eyes like dew on pansies.

“Why not let her romp a while with the other children?” suggested Rodrigo, looking over to where a dozen happy tatterdemalions were skipping songfully about in one of their favorite circle-dances. “There are no gypsies among them this morning, and it is to the gypsies that Tia Marta most objects.”

“Very well,” assented Don Carlos, relieved to see the grieved face brighten. “You may play with them this forenoon, if you like. But don’t follow tourists into the Alhambra.”

“And scamper home if the children get rude,” warned Big Brother.

“And don’t go near the Gypsy King,” put in Rafael.

Uncrushed by all this weight of masculine authority, Pilarica threw kisses to her three guardians as long as they were in sight and then flashed into the midst of the dancing circle, where she was welcomed with a gleeful shout. Carmencita clamored, as always, for Little White Pigeons, and so the children divided into two opposite rows, each line in turn clasping hands and lifting arms while the other danced under, as the song indicates:

Then they played Hide-and-Seek in their own special fashion. The first seeker was Pepito, who sat doubled over, with his chubby palms pressed tight against his eyes, while the others slipped softly into their hiding-places, all except Pilarica, who, as the Mother, stood by and gave Pepito his signal for the start by singing:

After they were tired of this, Isabelita called for Butterfly Tag and was chosen, because of her pink frock—torn though it was,—to be the Butterfly. Forming in a close circle about her, the children lifted her dress-skirt by the border and held it outspread, while Pilarica, on the outside, danced round and round the ring, fluting like a bird:

Then the children all at once lifted the pink frock and wrapped it about Isabella’s head, while Pilarica, dancing faster than ever, led them in singing seven times over:

Suddenly they varied the song:

In an instant the circle had broken and scattered, while the Butterfly, blinded and half smothered in the folds of the skirt, dashed about as best she could, trying to catch one or another of her teasing playmates.

Then followed Washerwoman, and Chicken-Market, Rose and Pink, and Golden Earrings, and when, at noon, Don Carlos and Rafael came back, the children were all absorbed in the circle-dance of Mambrú. Don Carlos remembered the song from his own childhood in Saragossa and hummed the pathetic couplets under his breath, as he stood watching.

With the last word of the song all the little figures in the circle flung themselves face downward on the ground, so impetuously that Carmencita and Pepito bumped their heads together and set up such a duet of stormy weeping that, for dramatic close, there was nothing left to be desired.

Don Carlos swung Pilarica, hotter and more weary than Rafael himself, to her feet, and as she smiled up into his face, she saw in it, for all its gravity, a great relief.

Tia Marta, too, who met them at the garden gate, was quick to read his look.

“Your heart has been taking a bath of roses,” she said.

And Don Carlos, in the same breath, was telling her his good tidings.

“Rodrigo drew a lucky number. There is weeping in other homes to-day, but not in ours.”

“Other people’s troubles are easily borne,” scoffed Tia Marta, but the dry, walnut face was twitching so strangely that the children wished it had been polite to laugh.

After their simple luncheon, a hunch of bread and a bowlful of olives for each, Pilarica coaxed Rafael out to the summer-house where the boy, not ill-pleased to have an audience for his story, seated himself with his back against the column and recounted the great event of the day.

“The Gov’ment,” he explained, with the dignity of a prime minister, “needs more soldiers for Cuba.”

“Acorns,” murmured Pilarica.

“And so it has set up in every city and town and village—my father told me so—urns for the lottery, and all the men who ar’n’t too young, like me, or too old, like Grandfather and the Geography Gentleman, draw out a number. If it’s a very, very high number, you don’t go to Cuba, but if isn’t, you do.”

“And Rodrigo?” breathed Pilarica, who was sitting on the ground exactly in front of Rafael, leaning forward and squeezing her sandals in her hands so hard that her toes ached all the rest of the afternoon.

Rafael’s eyes glowed.

“Oh, he was so tall and straight as he stood there waiting his turn. He had his cap in his hand and he waved it and looked right across the urn to my father and me and laughed. And my father took off his hat to him. Think of that! My father! Some day I am going to be a hero, like the Cid, and then, perhaps, he will take off his hat to me.”

Don Carlos, pacing back and forth on one of the tiled walks, smiled as he caught the words.

“And then it was Rodrigo’s turn?” prompted Pilarica.

“Yes, his turn among the very first, and I stood on my tippiest tiptoes to see. I saw his arm go down into the urn, and I saw it come up again, and in his hand was something that he held out to the officer who was marking the names. Then the officer smiled, and nodded to my father, and we knew it was all right; so we followed Rodrigo out of the hall to embrace him. And I wanted him to come back with us, but he waited to see how the luck went with his friends.”

It was not till late in the afternoon that Rodrigo came back, and then he did not come alone. Along the road was heard a sound of tramping feet and suddenly there broke forth the familiar song of Cuban conscripts.

“What does this mean?” demanded Don Carlos hoarsely, rising from the mosaic bench and fronting the lads as they thronged into the garden. He had already recognized Rodrigo’s voice and now he saw his son marching among the recruits.

There was a moment’s pause and then one of Rodrigo’s classmates stepped forward.

“We kiss your hands, Don Carlos,” he said, “and salute you as the father of a generous son. All Granada rings with his praises. For even while we, chosen for the King, were congratulating him on his better fortune, up to the urn came a young peasant, a laborer in the vineyards, as dazed as a pig in a pulpit. He drew a lot for the hungry island, and his mother—ah, you should have seen and heard her! They say it was she who led the rabble yesterday afternoon, when the women, hating Columbus for having ever discovered Cuba, stoned his statue in the Alameda. Her shrieks, as she pushed her way through the crowd to her boy, might have pierced the very bronze of that statue to the heart. The Civil Guards laid hands on her to drag her out, but she clung to that staring lout of hers like a starved dog to its bone. Then Rodrigo, the head of our class, the pride of the Institute, came forward and gave himself as a substitute for that dull animal, that mushroom there. And not even a God-bless-you did the unmannerly couple stay to give him, but made off as if a bull were after them. To bestow benefits upon the vulgar is to throw water into the ocean. But we, who know a great action when we see it, have escorted Rodrigo home to do him honor.”

For the first moment it looked to Rafael as if the stern face of his father had turned gray, but that may have been only the shadow of the olive-leaves above his head.

“You are welcome, Don Ernesto,” he replied in a voice even deeper than its wont, “and welcome to you all, soldiers of Spain. Marta, do me the favor to bring forth such refreshment as the house affords. Gentlemen, all that I have is yours. Take your ease and be merry.”

And so all was bustle and jollity till the conscripts trooped away again, and the family had, but only for one night more, Rodrigo to themselves. The children decided that it must be a fine thing, after all, to go and help put Cuba in its right place on the map, for everybody was talking faster and more cheerily than usual. Only Grandfather was heard murmuring a riddle that made a sudden silence in the group:

“Bullet,” guessed Pilarica, her lip quivering as she looked toward Big Brother.

“That’s the bullet I’m going to dodge,” laughed Rodrigo. “There are more bullets than wounds in every battle. Eh, Tia Marta?”

“A shut mouth catches no flies,” returned the old woman tartly. But she bundled Grandfather into the house where he was still heard crooning to his guitar:

Suddenly Don Carlos turned to Rodrigo, holding out both hands:

“My noble boy, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I will tell you frankly that I have thought it was your fault to lay overmuch stress on your own concerns and your own career, a career whose promise has indeed been bright, and now you have cast it all away that a peasant lad may not be torn from his mother.”

“I have no mother, sir,” replied Rodrigo, blushing like a girl and speaking in a hesitating way most unlike his usual fluency. “If there had been anyone to grieve over me like that—and yet I don’t know. Something happened—happened inside of me. It was as if a candle-flame went out and the daylight flooded in. After all, a life is a life.”

“Bah!” sniffed Tia Marta. “All trees are timber, but pine is not mahogany.”

Yet the children reasoned that she was not displeased, for she spared no pains to prepare a festival supper that evening, serving all the dishes that Rodrigo liked best, even to spiced wine and fritters.

X

TIA MARTA’S REBELLION

WHEN they gathered in the garden that evening, the grown people would still keep talking. Rafael and Pilarica, who were tired and drowsy after all the excitement of the day, missed the silence that usually fell as their father smoked and Rodrigo puzzled out his problems. To-night it seemed that nobody could keep quiet for ten seconds together.

“What shall I bring you back from Cuba, Tia Marta?” laughed Rodrigo.

“Yourself,” snapped the old woman, “with a grain of sense under your hair for something new.”

“And epaulets on my shoulders? I may return a general. Who knows?”

“Bah! Being a man I may come to be Pope. But many go out for wool and return shorn.”

Meanwhile Grandfather was strumming on his guitar and murmuring a riddle that neither of the children had heard before:

Before they could ask the answer, their father was pointing out to them the lovely cluster of stars that we call the Pleiades.

“Those are what shepherds know as the Seven Little Nanny Goats,” he said, “and that long river of twinkling light you see across the sky”—designating the Milky Way—“is the Road to Santiago. For Santiago, St. James the Apostle, was the Guardian Saint of all Spain in the centuries when the Moors and Christians were at war in the Peninsula, and the story goes that in one desperate battle, at sunrise, when the Christian cause was all but lost, there appeared at the head of their ranks an unknown knight gleaming in silver armor, as if he had ridden right out of the dawn, waving a snow-white banner stamped with a crimson cross. He charged full on the infidel army, his sword flashing through the air with such lightning force that his fierce white steed trampled the turbaned heads like pebbles beneath his hoofs. This was St. James—so the legend says—and from that time on he led the Christian hosts till the Moors were driven back to Africa. And up in Galicia, in the city of Santiago, where your Aunt Barbara lives, is his famous shrine, to which pilgrims used to flock from all over Europe, and they looked up at the heavens as they trudged along and named that beautiful stream of stars the Road to Santiago.”

Now information is amusing in the morning, and pleasant enough in the middle of the afternoon, when one’s brain has been refreshed by the siesta, but after a long day of dancing, walking, guests and feasting, information is good for little but to put one to sleep. Pilarica did not awaken even enough to know when her father and Big Brother kissed her good-night, but Rafael questioned with an enormous gape:

“Was Santiago’s horse as good as Bavieca?” and then his blinking eyes shut tight without waiting for the answer.

It was as well, as it turned out, that the children had a full night’s sleep, for never in all their lives had there been a day so crowded with emotions and surprises as the morrow. Pilarica in the great bed of the inner room and Rafael on his cot under the olive tree were aroused at the same time by angry screaming that their tousled heads, still in the borderland between sleep and waking, took at first for Lorito’s, but as the dream-mist cleared away, they knew the voice for that of Tia Marta in a rage. She was standing in the middle of the kitchen, arms akimbo, facing their father, whose hand was raised in a vain effort to check her torrent of words.

“Would you throw the rope after the bucket?” she was crying. “Is it not enough that the señorito must sail to the Indies, and you, but you would have me lead forth those forsaken innocents to Galicia? Galicia! That will I never do in spite of your teeth. Don’t tell me of their Aunt Barbara. Did she not stoop to marry a Galician? Bah! Coarse is the web out of which a Galician is spun. It is not the maid of the Giralda who will pass the end of her days among pigs.”

“But I cannot leave them, Marta, here on your hands. Their grandfather is now little more than a child himself. What could you do if Rodrigo and I should neither of us come back? No, no, the children must be in shelter. They must be with their kindred. The arrangements are all made. When my ship put in at Vigo for supplies, I took train to Santiago and settled the whole matter with my sister and her husband. And be assured that you, who have been so faithful, so devoted, will find warm welcome under their roof. You can be very useful to my sister.”

“Toss that bone to another dog. An Andalusian to go into service in Galicia! Take your wares to a better market. Is it at fifty years that one becomes a vagabond and goes about the world, sucking the wind? Ay de mi! The wheel of fortune turns swifter than a mill-wheel. Ah, but your heart, Don Carlos, is harder than a hazel-nut,—ay, as hard as your head, for the head of an Aragonese pounds the nail better than a hammer.”

“And your pride, my good Marta, is as big as a church. Why should you not serve my sister as you have served me? There is sunshine on the wall even in Galicia. And the children—how could they bear to lose you, too, on this day when they must lose so much? And what would become of you, if you were left behind?”

“The dear saints know. When one door shuts, another opens. Hammer away with that Aragonese head of yours till the skies fall. You are hammering on cold iron, Don Carlos. Whoever goes, Roxa and I stay here. You may tear my little angels from me, if you will, but not one step, not one inch of a step, does either foot of mine take toward Galicia.”

“Galicia? Who is going to Galicia?” called Rafael, appearing in the doorway.

“Out with you!” bade Tia Marta, stamping angrily. “The secret of three is nobody’s secret. Go wash your face, for the world is turned over since you washed it last. And out with you, too, Don Carlos, if I am ever to have a chance to get the chocolate ready.”

The chocolate, because of Tia Marta’s agitation or for some other reason, did not taste right that morning. Even Rafael set his bowl down half full. All was hurry and commotion. Rodrigo’s new knapsack and a bag of extra clothing for the voyage were swung upon Shags, while Don Quixote, who was beginning to wear a sleek and comfortable aspect that belied his name, was laden with the hammock and a couple of valises that the children, casting dismayed looks at each other, recognized as their father’s. Then Rodrigo embraced Grandfather and, with a mischievous air of gallantry, Tia Marta, who flung her arms about his neck and burst into a storm of crying. At first she refused to touch the hand that Don Carlos held out to her, but, suddenly relenting, snatched it to her lips and rushed back into the house, thrusting the ends of her saffron kerchief into her mouth to choke her sobs. Roxa, bristling and spitting, retreated under the bench. But Grandfather sat serene, crooning to his guitar:

Half the dwellers on the Alhambra hill and a swarthy troop from the gypsy caves flocked down to the railroad station with them. The English consul tucked into Rodrigo’s pocket a tiny purse through whose silken meshes came a yellow glint.

“My wife knit it last night for the finest lad we know,” he said. “If she had had more time, it would have been larger; but it serves to hold a little English gold, which is a good weapon everywhere.”

Arnaldo was in their following, and Leandro. Even Xarifa had a smile for the young soldier, but when he waved his cap to Zinga with a blithe compliment—“throwing flowers,” as the Spaniards say—the girl’s fierce eyes misted over. At the station were Rodrigo’s professors all praising him till his face was as red as a pomegranate blossom, and there, puffing and wheezing, was the Geography Gentleman, with a little case of medicine to ward off the Cuban fever, and there, just as the train was about to start, was a clumsy young peasant, who all but dropped the jar of honey he handed up to Rodrigo, and a gaunt woman, weeping like a fountain as she pressed upon her son’s deliverer a package of cheese-cakes made from milk of her one goat.

Both the children were so spell-bound by the cheering and the music, the strange faces and the dramatic scenes that were being enacted all about them, that they hardly realized what the moment meant when their father lifted them up for the good-bye kisses to Rodrigo, who, boyish and merry, stood squeezed in among his fellow-conscripts on the platform of the car. The children cried a little, but their father hushed them with a few grave words and drew them to one side, away from the press of people about the train.

“Nobody will hurt Rodrigo?” asked Pilarica, with a sudden terror knocking at her heart.

“No, my darling,” answered her father. “Nothing can hurt Rodrigo.”

“Is that because he is a hero?” queried Rafael, trying hard to get his voice safely through the fog in his throat.

“Yes,” assented Don Carlos. “That is because he is a hero. He has won his battle already.”

And with that the engine whistled, and the long train, packed close with smiling, singing, wet-eyed lads, each young figure leaning forward to wave a hand, to throw a kiss, to catch a rose, rumbled out of the station, while all along the line there rose a tumult of farewells.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

“Oh, my son!”

“Till we meet again!”

“Go with God!”

Then Don Carlos led the bewildered children back to the corner where he had left the donkeys in charge of a man who had been waiting there when they first arrived. Pilarica and Rafael were sure that they had never seen him before, for his was not a form to be forgotten, but Don Carlos had greeted him familiarly as Pedrillo. The man stood now, his short legs wide apart, grasping in one hand the bridles of Shags and Don Quixote, who were trying to pull him on to the sidewalk, while with the other he held the halter of a mule, whose ambition it was to cross the road. Behind this mule stood, in single file, two more, each with head-rope tied to the tail of the mule in front. All three were tall, well-kept, handsome animals, but the man had such a squat, dwarfish body that he looked to the children nearly as broad as he was long. The face under the grey sombrero had a nose so flat that it might about as well have had no nose at all. The stranger was dressed almost as gaily as an Andalusian in a grass-green jacket inset with yellow stripes and adorned with rows of bell-buttons, red sash, russet trousers and brown gaiters.

And now Don Carlos set his face in sterner lines than ever and spoke to the children briskly, as if there were no time to be lost.

“Your Uncle Manuel is a carrier, an expressman, as so many of the Galicians are. He is thrifty and well-to-do and owns his own train of mules. Among the muleteers who hire themselves out to him for trip after trip there is no one whom he trusts as much as Pedrillo here, and so he has sent Pedrillo to conduct you and Grandfather and Tia Marta, if she will go—”

Pedrillo winked.

“To Cordova, where you will find your uncle, with the rest of his men and mules, all ready for the return journey to Galicia, for you are to have the pleasure of a long visit with your Aunt Barbara and Cousin Dolores. But first will come wonderful weeks of travel, seeing Spain as you could never see it from the windows of a railway car.”

Pedrillo nodded hard like a toadstool in the wind.

“When your visit is done, I will come for you, if that is God’s will, but now I must take this train just drawing into the station, for I have to join my ship at Cadiz to-morrow. Rafael, listen to me. You have many things to do, my son. You must take care of your sister, now that you are the only able-bodied man left at home, and look after Shags and Don Quixote, who are going with you, and do what you can for Grandfather and Tia Marta. And be sure to kiss the Sultana’s foot for me as soon as you get back. I failed to pay her my parting respects and, besides, she may have a message for you. And Pilarica, little daughter of my heart, don’t forget to run out to the summer-house the minute you reach the garden. Who knows what may be waiting for you there? Now I leave you with Pedrillo, precious ones. Good-bye, good-bye, and Heaven bless you!”

But Rafael flung his arms wildly about his father, and would not let him go.

“Oh, I wish—I wish—” sobbed the boy.

“Wish nothing for yourself nor for me but that we may do our duty,” said Don Carlos, his voice, rich with caressing tones, as quiet as if they were all guessing riddles together under the old olive tree. “Hush! I will tell you one story, one short story, more. Will you give me a smile for a story, my Pilarica? And will you remember it every word, my Rafael, till I come again? The sun goes forth in the morning, on the course that God has set him, and never halts nor turns. Yet three times in the day he lifts his face and calls: ‘Lord, I am tired.’ And three times God answers him out of heaven and says: ‘Follow thy path.’ ”

Then Rafael let fall his clasping arms, and Pilarica’s smile, her mother’s smile, gleamed out through the tears, and their father’s look, as he lifted his hat, rested lovingly on two brave children before he turned and went swiftly out of their sight.

XI

UP AND AWAY

AS the children, riding their donkeys, came in sight of the garden, Tia Marta stood squinting over the gate. Her eyes were redder than ever, but they saw all there was to see. They saw the little olive face of Pilarica shining like the face of one who has looked upon a glory, for the child’s soul had caught fire from her brother’s deed of sacrifice and her father’s solemn words, from all the courage and the love of that farewell scene at the station. She had not known before in her short life that grief, as well as joy, is beautiful.

“It is the mother looks out of her eyes this day,” said the old woman, addressing Don Quixote, who twitched a friendly ear. “The holy rose loves the thorns amid which it grew.”

Pilarica understood this hardly better than the little white ass, though he made a point of looking impressed, but she could not wait to question, so eager was she to do her father’s bidding and explore the summer-house.

Rafael’s face was flushed and there was something glittering on his eyelashes that made him turn away from Tia Marta’s scrutiny. But his chin was squarer than ever and, even before seeking comfort from his fragmentary Sultana, he led away the donkeys with a new air of responsibility.

Then Tia Marta’s glance, flashing into indignant comprehension, fell on the queer figure that followed, leading the mules. If looks could kill, Pedrillo would have dropped with a thump in the dust of the road. The garden gate banged in his very face, but the Galician, nothing daunted, began to sing in a curious, croaking voice:

“I have no time to waste on vagabonds,” called Tia Marta over her shoulder, as she retreated to her kitchen. “My day is as full as an egg. So be off with you!”

“Ay, busy is the word, for we all start for Cordova at sun-up to-morrow,” returned Pedrillo in his gruff tone and rude northern accent.

“That lie is as big as a mountain,” cried Tia Marta, shaking her fist at an astonished oleander.

“I have got an idea between eyebrow and eyebrow,” continued Pedrillo, as unruffled as if Tia Marta had paid him a compliment. “I will put up Don Manuel’s mules where the little gentleman stables the donkeys and then I will come back and help you with the packing.”

“Huh! Break my head; then plaster it,” retorted Tia Marta. “I want no help of him who has come to rob me. Put your ugly beasts where you will, but get away with you!”

When the muleteer, a little later, sauntered through the garden, Tia Marta was sitting on the bench, shelling the beans for dinner. She split open the pods with angry motions and bit off the hard, black end of each bean as spitefully as if she had a special grudge against it. Roxa was curled up beside her and, uninvited, Pedrillo sat down on the farther end of the bench.

“The cat is washing her face,” he remarked, “a sure sign that a guest is coming. She expects me to eat most of those beans.”

“Humph!”

Pedrillo, undiscouraged, politely scratched Roxa’s head, and Roxa, in return, very rudely scratched his finger from nail to knuckle.

“Good cat!” chuckled Tia Marta, as the muleteer raised that bleeding member to his mouth.

The silence that ensued was broken only by a resentful miaul from Roxa, as Pedrillo, edging along the bench, pushed her off, until he suddenly observed:

“Galicia is much pleasanter than Andalusia.”

Only such a preposterous statement as this could have surprised Tia Marta out of her resolution not to speak another word to this grotesque and insolent intruder.

“Far countries make long liars,” she gasped, nearly swallowing a whole bean in her rage.

“But I like the prickly pear that abounds in these parts,” went on Pedrillo, stealing a roguish glance at the woman beside him. And again he gruffly intoned one of those Spanish coplas of which he seemed to have no less a store than Grandfather himself.

“I’ll ask you an Andalusian riddle,” jerked back Tia Marta revengefully, the pan upon her knees trembling with her wrath until the beans rattled:

“We know that in Galicia, too,” replied Pedrillo, moving an inch nearer his ungracious hostess. “Did you ever hear our story about the frog? Once two Galicians were tramping the road from Leon, and one said to the other: I’m going home to Galicia.’ ‘If God please,’ corrected his comrade. ‘Nay, whether God please or not,’ the profane fellow gave answer. ‘There’s only one stream now between me and my province, and I can cross that without God’s help.’ So for his impiety the water pulled him down and he was turned into a frog. Then for three years, what with leeches, swans and, worst of all, small boys, he did penance enough. But one day he heard a Galician about to cross the river say: ‘I am going home,’ ‘If God please,’ croaked the frog, and all in an instant, in a holy amen, he was a man once more and standing on good dry land in Galicia. And so I tell you, as a Christian should, that we all start at sun-up to-morrow for Cordova, if God please.”

Tia Marta tossed her head and squinted rebelliously at the twinkle-eyed mannikin now close beside her, but after the simple dinner, where Pedrillo, as good as his word, did the most of the eating, she knotted up the few belongings of Grandfather and the children in bright kerchiefs. They let her do as she thought best with their modest wardrobes, but Grandfather fitted his guitar-case with a strap so that it could be slung over his shoulders, while Pilarica gathered into Rodrigo’s book-satchel her most precious possessions, the castanets, the painted fan and—wonder of wonders!—a golden-haired doll in ravishing pink frock and white kid slippers that had mysteriously made its way from the shop-window in Granada to the summer-house. There she had found it taking a siesta—for its eyelids shut with a snap whenever it was laid upon its back—in the slender shadow cast by the lonely column. Rafael disposed his chief treasures about his sturdy little person. The small Geography was slipped inside his blouse, where it could be quickly consulted in case they should lose their way. The red cap, of whose magic he felt much in need, was on his head, and for the new silver watch—no child’s toy this, but a trusty time-keeper that might last out a lifetime—Tia Marta stitched a stout pocket under his belt. Nothing could have cleared the mist from Rafael’s eyes like the finding of that manly watch carefully looped by its chain about the shapely foot of his Sultana.

And when Tia Marta, kneeling before the great, brass-clamped, carven-footed chest in the inner room, raised its massive lid, she saw on top of the familiar contents a little packet of money marked with her name. Beating her breast, the old servant rocked herself to and fro. As if she wanted wages for the care of Doña Catalina’s cherubs! And now that she had gold and silver, she could go her own way. She could return to Seville and enter into service there with civilized people, with Andalusians, under the daily blessing of the Giralda. She was free to choose. And being free to choose, Tia Marta from that moment began, with all the zeal in the world, to make ready for the journey to Galicia. And Pedrillo, whose arms were as long as his legs were short, worked with her as naturally and effectively as one ox pulls with another.

“But this task is harder than the creation,” fretted Tia Marta and, indeed, there was much to do. The chest had been originally rented by Don Carlos with the house, and so had the large bed and the canvas cots and, of course, the box-bed in the kitchen. The hinged leaf that, when it was not serving as a table, hung against the wall, the stools, the meal-box, the brasero, the garden-tools, all these must be left. Don Francisco, taking over the place for his brother, who planned to make a living out of the garden by keeping a stall for fruit and flowers at the Alhambra entrance, had paid Don Carlos a few pesetas for them a week ago. But every old cooking-pot and baking-tin wrung the heart of Tia Marta. Not one horn spoon, not one wooden plate could she be persuaded to abandon. The chocolate bowls, the gypsy-woven bread-baskets, the pitchers and cups of tawny earthenware, the pair of great water-jars she would not leave behind, but Pedrillo, a miracle of good-nature, was so handy with his coils of rope and his rough pieces of duck and burlap that he managed to make it possible for her to take what she wanted most. In the confusion Pilarica, whose angel moods alternated with others that could hardly be so described, laid hands on her grimy scrap of embroidery and, making escape with it to the boxwood hedge in which Rodrigo had clipped out his green menagerie, thrust it joyfully down the throat of the largest lion,—a buried treasure for the little nieces of Don Francisco to discover.

In one way or another, they were all busy as bees till the stars came out, when the children, at least,—though Rafael slept on a wet pillow—fell into such sound, sweet slumber that they wakened, with the sense of adventure overbearing the sense of loss, as good as new in the first freshness of the morning.

Early as it was, the dawn just silvering the edges of the east, Pedrillo and Grandfather, who had been a famous horseman in his day, were busy lading the mules, matching riddles meanwhile so merrily that Pilarica and even Rafael could hardly swallow their chocolate for laughing.

piped Grandfather, handing over a box of Malaga raisins.

grunted Pedrillo, tucking a bottle of wine and a bottle of vinegar into opposite corners of a striped saddle-bag already stuffed almost to bursting.

Tia Marta, searching wildly about for any pet objects that might have been overlooked, now came rushing forth with a scrubby palm-leaf broom. Twisting a wry face, Pedrillo shoved it under the straps of one of the loads, while Grandfather sang:

Meanwhile Pedrillo had come to grief. Setting his foot against the flank of the mule he was loading, he pulled so vigorously on the cords that cinched the pack as to burst two buttons off his trousers. As this garment boasted only four, the dilemma was serious.

The dumpy little fellow held up those two iron buttons to Tia Marta with a comical look, croaking:

“But I’ve lost my scissors,” wailed the old woman. “They slipped out of my hand just now when I was gathering up—ay de mi!—the last things from the chest, and that room in there is darker than Jonah’s chamber in the whale.”

“Hunt up a candle and look for them, can’t you?” begged Pedrillo of the children.

It was Pilarica who found, under the bench, a stray inch of tallow-dip, but it was Rafael who carried it through the house, holding it close to the floor, while Grandfather quavered:

When the scissors turned up, Pedrillo hailed them with a joyous couplet:

The buttons were sewed on with Tia Marta’s stoutest thread, and so, with song and jest, with bustle and stir and the excitement of trifling mischances, the great departure was made. On each mule, already hung with saddle-bags, Pedrillo had fitted a round stuffed frame, covering the entire back. Over this he had spread a rainbow-hued cloth and roped on baggage until the mules, in protest, swelled out their sides so that the cords could not stretch over anything more. Then Pedrillo, after vainly remonstrating with each animal in turn, had strapped another gay manta over the whole. On Peregrina, whose harness boasted a double quantity of red tassels and strings of little bells, he had piled up the baggage so cunningly as to afford a support for Tia Marta’s back, but the Daughter of the Giralda, though undaunted by the loftiness of her proposed throne, had made her own choice among the mules.

“This is mine,” she declared perversely, laying her hand on Capitana, a meek-mannered beast that stood dolefully on three legs, her ears drooping, her eyes half-closed, and her head laid pensively upon the rump of the soot-colored Carbonera.

Pedrillo hesitated a moment, then grinned and helped Tia Marta scramble up to her chosen perch, where she crooked her right knee about a projection of the frame in front with an air that said she had been on mule-back many a time before.

“Now give me Roxa,” she demanded. “Do you suppose I would leave my gossip behind?”

But Roxa had her own views about that, and no sooner had Pedrillo, catching puss up by the scruff of her neck, flung her into Tia Marta’s arms, than she tore herself loose, bounded on to Capitana’s head and off again to the ground, where she had shot out of sight under the shrubbery in less time than Tia Marta could have said Bah. But Tia Marta had no chance to say even that, for Capitana, insulted at the idea of being ridden by a clawing cat, curled her upper lip, kicked out at Don Quixote, snapped at the heels of Grandfather who was just clambering to his station on the back of Carbonera, skipped to one side, dashed by the other mules and, with a flourish of ears and tail, took the head of the procession. Thus it was that, just as the full sunrise flushed the summits of the Sierra Nevada, a lively cavalcade burst forth from the garden gate. Capitana, utterly disdainful of Tia Marta’s frenzied tugs on the rope reins, pranced on ahead, her bells in full jingle. Pedrillo, dragging the reluctant Peregrina along by the bridle, ran after, shouting lustily. Grandfather followed on Carbonera, and the children on their donkeys brought up the rear. It was not a moment for tears. Rafael, as the head of this disorderly family, was urging Shags forward to the rescue of Tia Marta, and when Pilarica turned for a farewell look, what she saw was Roxa atop of the garden wall,—Roxa serenely washing her face and hoping that the new family would keep Lent all the year, so that there might be plentiful scraps of fish.

XII

THE OPEN ROAD

EARLY as it was, the Alhambra children were out in force to bid their playmates good-bye.

“A happy journey!” “Till we meet again!” called the better-nurtured boys and girls, while the gypsy toddlers, Benito and Rosita, echoed with gusto: “Eat again!”

By this time Pedrillo had overtaken Capitana and, seizing her by the bridle, was proceeding to thump her well with a piece of Tia Marta’s broom, broken in the course of the mule’s antics, when Pilarica, putting Don Quixote to his best paces, bore down upon the scene in such distress of pity that the beating had to be given up. But Pedrillo twisted the halter around Capitana’s muzzle and so tied her to the tail of Peregrina. Thereupon Capitana, all her mulish obstinacy enlisted to maintain her leadership, began to bray and plunge in such wild excitement that even the decorous Carbonera danced in sympathy. Finally Capitana flung herself back with all her weight and pulled until it seemed that Peregrina’s tail must be dragged out by the roots, but, happily, the halter broke, and again Capitana, trumpeting her triumph, came to the front.

“Child of the Evil One!” groaned Pedrillo, rubbing his wrenched shoulder, while Tia Marta swayed on her pinnacle, and Peregrina cautiously twitched the martyred tail to make sure it was still on. And after Capitana’s escapades, Don Quixote still further delayed the progress of the train by a determination to turn in at every courtyard where he had been accustomed to deliver charcoal and pay a parting call.

Some of the ruder gypsy children scampered alongside, jeering at Pedrillo’s ugliness and Tia Marta’s plight, but at last even the fleet-footed Leandro had dropped back and the prolonged sound of Pepito’s bellow of affectionate lament came but faintly on the breeze. Then Grandfather, lifting his eyes to the dazzling mountain peaks from which the sunrise glow had vanished, began to sing in fuller voice than usual:

“Did you ever see the ocean, Grandfather?” asked Rafael, with a longing in his uplifted eyes that the old man understood.

“Ay, laddie, and so have you, for the first four years of your life were lived in Cadiz. Don’t you remember how the great billows used to break against the foot of the sea-wall? But I like better the waves that play on the shore at Malaga.”

And again Grandfather sang gaily, for it made the blood laugh in his old veins to feel the strong motion of a mule beneath him once more:

“I don’t remember the sea as well as the ships,” said Rafael.

“Ah, the ships!” responded Grandfather.

“It is a sight the saints peep down from the windows of heaven to see—a ship under full sail.

Carbonera and Shags had now come up with the rest of the cavalcade, which had halted at a wayside fountain to wash out dusty throats, and while Pedrillo was watering the mules and donkeys, Tia Marta, who had regained her breath after her jolting, struck into the conversation with the zest of a tongue that would make up for lost time.

“Bah! Why are you asking your grandfather about ships? He will tell you nothing but rhymes and nonsense. Did I not dwell at Cadiz for a baker’s dozen of years and what is there about ships I do not know? Live with wolves and you’ll learn to howl. Live in Cadiz and you’ll soon know the difference between the sailing-vessels, that spread their white wings and skim over the water like swans, and the battle-ships, dark and low like turtles. God sends his wind to the sailing-ship, but it’s the devil’s own engines, roaring with flame and steam deep down in the iron lungs of them, that drive on the man-of-war.”

“And my father is the master of those roaring engines,” thought Rafael with a thrill of pride, as Capitana started on again with a lunge that nearly dismounted Tia Marta, taken off her guard as she was. Falling back to the end of the train, the boy gave his red cap an impatient twirl, but its magic did not avail to show him what he so yearned to see,—Cadiz, the white city rising like a crystal castle at the end of the eight-mile rope of sand; Cadiz, the Silver Cup into which America, once upon a time, had poured such wealth of gold and gems and marvels; Cadiz, that its lovers liken to a pearl clasped between the parted turquoise shells of sea and sky, or to a nest of sea-gulls in the hollow of a rock. Just then—could Rafael’s hungry gaze have reached so far—a grim battleship was lying like a stain upon those azure waters and from her turret a stern-faced officer, with the stripes of a Chief Engineer, was watching through a spy glass a herd of conscripts, driven like cattle down the wharf to the waiting transports.

Don Quixote began to droop as the midday heats came on, and Pedrillo, still trudging along on foot, swung Pilarica up to Peregrina’s back.

“And how does our little lady like the open road?” asked the muleteer.

Pilarica had not words to tell him how much she liked it,—how strange and how enchanting every league of the way, rough or smooth, was to her senses. Under that violet sky all the world, except for the snowy mountain-tops, was green with spring,—the emerald green of the fig trees, the bluish green of the aloes, the ashen green of the olives. Every fruit orchard, every vineyard, the shepherds on the hills with flocks whose fleeces shone like silver in the sun, the gleam of the whitewashed villages, all these made the child’s heart leap with a buoyant happiness she knew not how to utter. The stranger it all was, the more she felt at home. As here and there, for instance, they passed an unfamiliar tree, it became at once a friend, and almost a member of their caravan. The hoary sycamores were so many grandfathers reaching out their arms to Pilarica; the locusts clapped their little round hands like playmates, and the pepper-trees, festooned with red berries, seemed to rival the gaudy trappings of the mules. Every turn in the road was an adventure. But the child could find no better language for her thoughts than the demure question:

“Do you think, Don Pedrillo, that we shall meet a bear?”

“Surely not,” the Galician hastened to answer; “there are no bears left in Spain to trouble the king’s highways. But if one should peep out from under the cork trees there, all I would need to do would be to fling a hammer or a horseshoe at him, and whoop! Off would amble Señor Bear, whimpering like Diego when his wife first ate the omelet and then beat him with the frying-pan. For, you see, the bear was once a blacksmith, but so clumsy at the forge that he scorched his beard one day and pounded his thumb the next, till he growled he would rather be a bear than a blacksmith, and our Lord, passing by with Peter, James and John, took him at his word. And the bear is still so afraid of being turned back into a blacksmith that if you throw the least piece of iron at him, he will run away like memory from an old man.”

“Grandfather remembers,” protested Pilarica.

Pedrillo twisted his head and laughed to see how erect the white-haired rider was sitting upon his pack.

“He is only fifty years old to-day,” he said, “but it is high time for our nooning. We’ll not squeeze the orange till the juice is bitter. Eh, señora?”

And Tia Marta replied quite affably: “You are right, Don Pedrillo. Fifty years is not old.”

“It is the very cream of the milk,” gallantly assented the muleteer, helping down first Tia Marta and then Grandfather, for their muscles were yet stiff, however young their spirits might have grown.

How glad the mules and donkeys were to browse in the shade! And how briskly Tia Marta sliced into her best earthenware bowl, the drab one with dull blue bands, whatever was brought her for the salad in addition to her own contribution of a crisp little cabbage! Pedrillo produced from one of his striped saddle-bags a handful of onions, so fresh and delicate that a Spanish taste could fancy them even uncooked, and lifting one between finger and thumb, croaked the copla:

Then Grandfather, not to be outdone, held up to general view a scarlet pepper full of seeds, reciting:

Pilarica, meanwhile, to whose guardianship Tia Marta had entrusted three hard-boiled eggs that morning, brought them safely forth from the satchel, where they had been hobnobbing with the doll, the fan and the castanets, and passed them over one at a time, to prolong the game. She herself remembered a rhyme to the purpose and sang it very sweetly to a tune of her own, dancing as she sang:

Pedrillo made sport for them, when the second egg appeared, by trying to follow Pilarica’s example, but it was an uncouth dance that his short legs accomplished in time to the copla:

But Grandfather’s verse, for the third egg, was voted quite the best of all:

Only Rafael, who had slipped away for a reason that could be guessed at, when he reappeared, by certain clean zigzags down his dusty cheeks, missed the fun, but at least he did his share in making away with the salad, when Tia Marta had given it the final deluge of olive-oil. It was a pleasant sight for the branching walnut tree that shaded their feast,—the five picnickers all squatting, long wooden spoons in one hand and crusty hunches of bread in the other, about that ample bowl where, in fifteen minutes, not even a shred of cabbage was left to tell the tale.

But the siesta was a short one for Grandfather, and he rocked drowsily on Carbonera through the heats of the afternoon, though never losing his balance. Tia Marta, who was now as bent on leading as Capitana herself, had a fearsome time of it, despite Pedrillo’s ready hand at the bridle, for the way had grown hilly, and the mule, having a sense of humor, scrambled and slid quite unnecessarily, on purpose to hear the shrieks from the top of her pack.

“In every day’s journey there are three leagues of heart-break,” encouraged the muleteer, but Tia Marta answered him in her old tart fashion:

They had covered barely a dozen miles of their long way to Cordova when they put up at a village inn for the night, all but the Galician too tired to relish the savory supper of rabbit-pie that was set before them. Tia Marta and Pilarica slept on a sack of straw in the cock-loft over the stable. Grandfather and Rafael were less fortunate, getting only straw without a sack, but that, as Rafael manfully remarked, was better than a sack without straw. Pilarica, too, proved herself a good traveller, enjoying the novelty even of discomfort. Drowsy as she was, she did not fail to kneel for her brief evening prayer:

The floor of the loft was fashioned of rough-hewn planks so clumsily fitted together that the sleepers had a dim sense, all night long, of what was going on in the stable below,—the snoring of Pedrillo, the munching of the donkeys, the jingling of the mule-bells and the capers of Capitana.

With the first glimmer of dawn, Pedrillo began to load the mules.

“Waking and eating only want a beginning,” he shouted up to his comrades of the road.

“Your rising early will not make the sun rise,” groaned Tia Marta. “Ugh! That mule born for my torment has made of me one bruise. There is not a bone in my body that hasn’t an ache of its own. Imbecile that I am! Why should I go rambling over the world to seek better bread than is made of wheat?”

“Don’t speak ill of the journey till it is over,” returned Pedrillo. “I declare to you, Doña Marta, that the world is as sweet as orange blossoms in this white hour when the good God dawns on one and all. And as for Capitana, she is fine as a palm-branch this morning, but as meek as holy water, and will carry you as softly as a lamb.”

And Capitana, hearing this, tossed her head, gay with tufts of scarlet worsted, and kicked out at Don Quixote in high glee.

XIII

THE CITY OF DREAMS

WITH HIS FACE TO SHAG’S TAIL.

IT was the sultriest afternoon since they had left Granada and the little company rode languidly, wilted under the heats that poured down upon them from that purple sky which, the Andalusians say, God created only to cover Spain. Pedrillo had slung his gay jacket across one shoulder and cocked his hat against the sun. The faithful Carbonera stepped more carefully than ever because she knew that Grandfather was dozing in his seat, and even Capitana was so far appeased by the shady olive spray that Tia Marta had fitted into the headstall as to leave that much-teased rider free to screen herself with a green umbrella bordered with scarlet, a gift from the Galician. Rafael’s red fez had no rim, so that, to escape the sun, he had turned himself about on his donkey and was riding, quite at his ease, with his face to Shags’ tail. There was no danger that Shags would run away with him! Indeed, it would have been hard to tell which of the two was the drowsier, the little gray ass with ears a-droop, or the nid-nodding boy who rode him in such curious fashion. But as for Pilarica, although she held her dainty fan unfolded over her forehead, the shaded eyes were as bright and eager as ever and missed nothing of the sights along the way. It seemed to her that she could never tire of those orchards rich in the pale gold of lemons or the ruby of pomegranates, of the reaches of sugarcane shimmering in the sun, of the rows of mulberries, the bright mazes of red pepper, the plantations of sprawling figs, the bristling hedges of cactus, the rosy judas trees and the pink almonds, the white farm-buildings all enclosed, with their olive presses or their threshing floors, in high walls set with little towers and pinnacles. Whether it was a beggar munching a cabbage stalk in the shadow of a palm, or an old woman in her doorway plaiting grass cordage, or a fruit-seller sitting beside his green and golden pyramid of melons, or a kneeling group of washer-women, with skirts well tucked up, beating out clothes in a rivulet, to each and all she flirted her fan with a coquettish Andalusian greeting.

And now she saw that they were nearing a village. They passed a group of children leading a pet lamb adorned with blue ribbons, that had evidently been taken out into the fields for a frolic and was bringing in its supper, for on the woolly back bobbed up and down a little basket filled with grass, of which Don Quixote attempted to taste. A swineherd strode down from the hills blowing a twisted cow’s-horn, and a huddle of curly-tailed pigs came scrambling after, full fed with acorns and ready for home.

An inn stood at the entrance of the village,—a low house, freshly whitewashed, half hidden in honeysuckle, with yellow mustard and sprigs of mignonette springing up on the roof between the tiles that shone green and red in the keen, quivering light. A lattice built in the open space before the door supported the wandering stems of an old grapevine, whose broad leaves made a canopy for the rush chairs and rickety tables set out beneath. As the cavalcade advanced, a line of roguish boys, hand in hand, ran down the street, barring the way, singing as they came:

“And as good a tea-bell as any,” remarked Pedrillo. “It is three hours yet to Cordova and supper. We may as well make it four. Eh, Doña Marta?”

“A sparrow in the hand is better than a bustard on the wing,” assented a dusty voice from under the green umbrella.

So they all dismounted, while the hens, calling to one another: “Tk ca! Tk ca! Take care!” scuttled before the mules and donkeys as these were led into the path of shadow east of the house, where water and a few handfuls of barley soon gave them a better opinion of life. The travellers, seeking the shade of the rustic arbor, were served by a stately, withered old dame with fig bread, made into rolls like sausages, with cherries and aniseed water. Noting a row of beehives along the garden hedge, Grandfather sang softly:

and the old dame, comprehending, brought a piece of delicate honeycomb. But from ground and trees there came such a lulling hum of insects, like the whirr of fairy spinning-wheels, that Grandfather was fast asleep before the honeycomb arrived. Rafael and Pilarica, however, saw to it that the dainty was not slighted.

“It’s only a snack, this,” apologized Pedrillo, “but we’ll fare better in Cordova.”

“Bread with love is sweeter than a chicken with strife,” said Tia Marta gloomily. “I would our journey ended at Cordova.”

“Tell us about our Uncle Manuel, please, Don Pedrillo,” spoke up Rafael suddenly. “Is he a good man?”

“Ay, as upright as the finger of Saint John. He is no common carrier, your uncle. People trust him with packets of rare value, and he is charged with affairs of importance, as the receipt and payment of money.”

“Is money important?” asked Rafael.

“Your uncle thinks so, but I tell him that many a man gets to heaven in tow breeches. Yet surely it fares ill in this world with the people of the brown cloak. There is a saint, they say, called San Guilindon, who is forever dancing before the throne of God and singing as he dances:

On that saint I, for one, shall not waste candles.”

“Does Uncle Manuel ever get angry with his mules?” asked Pilarica anxiously, for she had not travelled the white road all these days without hearing the curses of harsh voices and the thwack of heavy blows.

“Not often, Little Canary of the Moon. Don Manuel is calmer than the parish church.”

“And our Cousin Dolores?” pursued Pilarica. “Is she pretty?”

“Nothing is ugly at fifteen.”

“And our Aunt Barbara, my father’s own sister? She is lovely, of course,” asserted Rafael, the wistful look crossing his brown face.

but Doña Barbara is one of the best.”

Suddenly Tia Marta beat her fist upon the table.

“Ay de mi! That I, an Andalusian of Seville, must go to Galicia, to the ends of the earth, to serve in the house of strangers!” she cried chokingly. “How shall I bear the ways of a mistress? Whether the pitcher hit the stone, or the stone hit the pitcher, it goes ill with the pitcher.”

Then there fell upon the group a silence that awakened Grandfather.

“Is the coach rolling over sand,” he asked, “or are the wings of an angel shedding hush as he passes overhead?”

Pedrillo, who had fallen into a deep muse, roused himself with a laugh.

“We have all been dreaming,” he said in his gruffest tone. “It is because we are so near to Cordova, the City of Dreams. And yet we are three hours away. But he who goes on, gets there.”

As the muleteer was paying the modest charge, the children watched the swineherd who, in his tattered cloak and sugar-loaf hat, was passing down the street, while the pigs, without pausing to say good night, scurried off every one to his own threshold. A goatherd, too, whose cloak was faded and whose leather gaiters flapped in rags, was milking his goats from door to door.

“People of the brown cloak!” murmured Rafael thoughtfully.

It was already cooler and the beasts they mounted were refreshed as well as the riders.

“Go on your way with God!” called the old dame from the threshold.

“And do thou abide with God!” chorused the travellers.

Not until the evening was well advanced did they find themselves at last treading the stone lanes of Cordova, a mysterious, Oriental city, whose narrow streets were empty at this time except for a few cloaked, gliding figures and silent except for the tinkling of guitars. It was dark between the high walls of the houses, yet the children caught an occasional glimpse through some arched doorway, as the tenant came or went, of an enchanted patio, its marble floor and leaping fountain transformed by the moonlight into the unreal beauty of a dream. In every street at least one cavalier stood clinging to the grating of a Moorish window, whispering “caramel phrases,” or, his gaze lifted to some dim balcony, pouring forth his soul in serenade.

“Ah, this is like my Seville. So long as lovers ‘eat iron,’ we are in Andalusia yet,” sighed Tia Marta.

“I know about Murillo. He painted a whole skyful of Virgins and cherubs. Grandfather told me,” piped up Pilarica.

“Yet I warrant you he’ll eat a good breakfast to-morrow morning,” chuckled Pedrillo.

“That is my saint,” said Rafael proudly.

“Ay, and the Guardian of Cordova and the Patron of Travellers,” added Pedrillo. “His image stands high on the bell-tower yonder and it would be well for you to thank him for our good journey.”

“Does he take care of travellers on the ocean, too?” asked Rafael, remembrance of his father and brother tugging always at his faithful little heart.

But Pedrillo did not answer, for suddenly the three mules, quickening their tired pace, whisked about and made for a familiar portal.

The children let Shags and Don Quixote pick their own way through the great, dirty courtyard, crammed with carts and canvas-covered wagons, with bales, baskets and packages of all sorts, with horses, mules and donkeys and with sleeping muleteers outstretched on the rough cobblestones, each wrapped in the manta of his beast, his hat pulled down over his face and his head pillowed on a saddle.

“But their beds are as hard as San Lorenzo’s gridiron,” exclaimed Tia Marta.

“And much colder,” added Pedrillo. “Yet hear them snore! There’s no bed like the pack-saddle, after all. Here! I will tie up these friends of ours for a minute, while I take you in to see Don Manuel.”

So he hastily fastened the animals to iron rings set in a wall, on which hung huge collars and other clumsy pieces of harness as well as festoons of red peppers strung up there to dry.

Crossing a threshold, they were at once in a large room, so smoky that the children fell to coughing. An immense fireplace, where a big kettle hung by a chain over the glowing embers, occupied all the upper end. Stone benches were built into the wall on either side of this enormous hearth, and from one of them a man arose and came slowly forward.

“In a good hour, Don Manuel,” was Pedrillo’s greeting.

“In a bad hour,” returned his employer bluntly. “You are two days late and I was minded, if you did not turn up by to-morrow morning, to go on without you.”

Uncle Manuel was of robust figure and weather-beaten face. He wore, like Galician carriers in general, a black sheepskin jacket, but his was fastened in front by chain-clasps of silver. His manners were not Andalusian, for he did not embrace even Pilarica. He looked the children over keenly and not unkindly, led Grandfather to his own seat near the fire, on which the inn keeper had thrown a heap of brushwood to welcome the newcomers, and paid no attention whatever to Tia Marta, who felt herself ready to burst with rage. It was Pedrillo who found a place for her at the very end of the opposite bench and even this slight courtesy called out a noisy burst of laughter from his comrades.

“And see what a dandy he has made of himself,” mocked Hilario, who resented, in behalf of his own ginger-colored blouse and cowhide sandals, Pedrillo’s new finery.

“Dress a toad and it looks well,” taunted Tenorio, so long and lean and bony that Pilarica quietly held up her doll to get a good view of him.

“If it only had wings, the sheep would be the best bird yet,” put in Bastiano, whose voice was not merely gruff, as all those Galician voices were, but surly, too.

Tia Marta looked to see Pedrillo take vengeance for these insults, but when the flat-nosed little fellow only laughed good-humoredly, her wrath broke loose.

“The lion is not so brave as they tell us,” she snapped, squinting worse than ever because of the smoke.

And at once the rough jests of the muleteers, diverted from Pedrillo, were brought to bear on her.

“But here is a woman with a temper hot enough to light two candles at.”

“Sourer than a green lemon.”

“Long tongues want the scissors.”

“A goose’s quill hurts more than a lion’s claw.”

And still Pedrillo stood sheepishly smiling, even when Tia Marta rounded on him and on them all with the hated copla:

A growl went up from the benches, but Uncle Manuel interposed:

“And what wonder that her patience has lost the stirrup? Tired and hungry, and then baited like a bull by your rusty wits! Out to the courtyard with all of you and help Pedrillo curry the beasts.”

But Tia Marta dropped scalding tears of vexation into her bowl of puchero, though that delectable mixture of boiled meat, chickpeas and all manner of garden stuff, was already quite hot enough with red pepper and garlic.

Uncle Manuel, having seen to it that the food was prompt and plentiful, did not speak to any of them as they ate, but busied himself with adding up columns of figures in a much-worn account book that he drew from an inner pocket. When they had finished, however, he took from the inn keeper’s hand a little iron lamp, shaped like a boat, and helped Grandfather up the ladder that led to the loft. There he conducted them to two small rooms, roughly boarded off, with a low partition between them. Hanging the lamp by its ring from a nail, he opened the beds to make sure that the coarse sheets were fresh, and left them with a grave “Sleep in peace.”

The mattresses were stuffed with cornhusks of an especially lumpy sort, and that, perhaps, as well as the spell of Cordova, had something to do with the fact that they all slept restlessly, dreaming homesick dreams. Tia Marta heard the hawks wheel and whistle above the Giralda, and their faces were like the face of Pedrillo. Pilarica, nestling beside her, moved her little white feet, dancing for Big Brother, who held one hand hidden as if to surprise her with a gift when the dance was done. And beyond the partition Grandfather murmured the pet name of his twin sister who had died in childhood, more than threescore years ago, while Rafael’s red lips curved in a happy smile, for he stood with his father in the roaring heart of a swift battle-ship, which changed in an instant to a beautiful stillness, and they stood in the heart of God.

XIV

TRAVELING BY MULE-TRAIN

THE boy was wakened by Grandfather’s voice. The only man, lying on his back, was conversing with a spider whose long cobweb floated from a rafter.

“And it is cloudy,” announced Rafael, who had jumped up and thrust his head through an opening, that could hardly be called a window, in the wall. “How did you know, Grandfather?”

“Oh, I can feel the sky without seeing it, and this morning it is

“So it is,” assented Rafael. “I believe we are going to have a rainy day.”

Yet any kind of a day is interesting to a child, and Rafael, having quickly disposed of a cup of chocolate as thick as flannel, was soon out in the courtyard, where horses were snorting, donkeys braying, and mule-drivers, called arrieros in Spain, bawling out guttural reproaches to their beasts. They were nearly all Galicians, these arrieros, with honest, homely faces. All wore peaked caps that increased their resemblance to a company of little brown gnomes. Among them Tenorio looked more tall and gaunt than ever. He was leading out a graceful, spirited mule, sheared all over except on the legs and the tip of the tail and decorated not only with the usual red tufts and tassels and fringes, but with a profusion of tinsel tags. She carried saddle-bags, but nothing more except a copper bell as large as a coffee-pot which dangled under her neck and marked her out as the leader of the train.

Several strings of mules had gone already and others were just getting away, their bells jingling merrily and their drivers in full cry. “Arre, ar-r-r-e, ar-r-r-r e!” rent the air to the accompaniment of cracking whips and thwacking cork-sticks. The courtyard was so nearly cleared that Rafael easily made his way over to Tenorio.

“Is that Uncle Manuel’s mule?” he asked.

“Ay, his Coronela, and a pampered beast she is,” answered the Galician. “The master loves her so well that he would give her white bread and eat black himself. But what do you think of our cavalry here?”

Then Rafael saw that Pedrillo and Hilario were getting a bunch of pack-mules into line. Their loads were piled high, but they were stolid, heavy beasts, unlike the riding mules, and though they grunted under the burden and tried to get rid of their packages by rubbing against one another, they were so docile that a touch of the staff would send each to its place. But Bastiano, he of the surly voice, was having difficulties with a new mule, white and sleek, that he was lading. Blanco’s head was roped up; the two bales, having been carefully poised to make sure that they were of equal weight and would balance each other, had been slung over his back, but as Bastiano was about to lash them on, Blanco plunged and the load was tumbled to the ground.

“Ha, Tough-Hide!” snarled Bastiano. “That is the trick you would play on me, is it?”

And plucking up a large stone, he struck the animal cruelly on the side of the head.

“No, no!” cried a childish voice, and Pilarica was clinging to his arm. “You mustn’t hurt the poor mule like that. Oh, you mustn’t! You mustn’t!”

“It’s the only talk he understands,” muttered Bastiano, his lean brown face slowly flushing under the horror in those dusky eyes. “You can’t treat mules like bishops.”

“Why not?” asked Pilarica.

“The world is coming to a pretty pass when a man can’t bang his beast,” growled Bastiano, dropping the stone, while Blanco planted his four feet wide apart in stubborn resistance to anything and everything that might be demanded of him.

At that point there pierced through all the tumult of the courtyard the shrill tones of Tia Marta.

“Pilarica! Rafael! What have you bandits done with my children? Smoked sardines of Galicia that you are! Of all the rascally—”

A roar of laughter cut her sentence short.

“Here Aunt Anna Hardbread comes again to throw a cat in our faces.”

“Look out for her! Old straw soon kindles.”

“Call us names and you’ll be sorry. Though we wear sheepskin, we’re no sheep.”

“Is it true that Dame Spitfire is going with us?”

“Bad news is always true.”

“Give her civil words, then. A teased cat may turn into a lion.”

“Señora, may your joys increase—and your tongue shorten!”

“May you live a thousand years—that is, nine hundred and ten years more!”

“Ruffians!” gasped Tia Marta, as soon as she could get her voice for fury. “Cheese-rinds! If only there was a man, an Andalusian, here!”

And she glared on Pedrillo, who, more embarrassed than he had ever been in his life, was standing on one foot and scratching his bushy head.

“An Andalusian!” taunted Bastiano. “Much good that would do you. Everything with the Andalusians passes off in talk. They are all mouth. Crabs with broken claws could fight better than your Andalusian fiddlers.”

“What is Andalusia?” mocked Hilario. “A Paradise where the fleas are always dancing to the tunes played by the mosquitoes.”

Thereupon something like a diminutive battering-ram took Hilario in the stomach and he sat down so unexpectedly that he tripped up the long legs of Tenorio, who bit the dust beside him. Then Rafael, his black eyes blazing, leapt on Bastiano, who, stumbling back in his surprise against Blanco, was dealt a well-deserved mule-kick that sent him, too, sprawling on the cobblestones.

“Now they will kill me,” thought Rafael and drew his small figure erect to meet his fate like a hero. At least, if he had not captured five Moorish kings, he had brought three Galician arrieros low, and perhaps his prowess would be sung in ballads yet to be. But to his astonishment, and somewhat to his discomfiture, the courtyard rang with friendly laughter and applause, in which Hilario and Tenorio, quickly regaining their feet, heartily joined.

“Good for young Cockahoop!”

“Bravo! Bravo!”

“As valiant as the Cid!”

Even Bastiano, still sitting on the ground and rubbing his bruised shin, regarded the fiery little champion of Tia Marta and of Andalusia with an amused respect.

But Uncle Manuel, hurrying back from business in the city and expecting to find his string of mules ready and waiting, bent his brows on the scene in evident perplexity.

“It is not too late,” he said to Pedrillo, “to let you take the woman and little girl and the old man on to Santiago by railroad. My nephew may choose for himself, but I think he will like to ride with us.”

“Yes, yes!” urged the muleteers.

“We need a protector,” chuckled Hilario.

“And so do I,” cut in Tia Marta. “The boy is the only man among you. As to that Pedrillo, Don Manuel, I tell you once for all that we will not journey in his care. I would not trust him with a sack of scorpions.”

“Tut, tut!” protested Don Manuel. “One can accomplish more with a spoonful of honey than with a quart of vinegar. But if not Pedrillo, then who? The railroad is dangerous at the best, and there are several changes to be made from train to train and from train to diligence. I cannot send you on by yourselves and I can not go with you. Besides, it would be wasteful. The mules and donkeys are already provided, but the railroad will cost much money,—the railroad that has so hurt the business of us Galician carriers.”

“We are well enough off as we are,” said Tia Marta curtly, “if only we need not have speech with these sons of perdition.”

So Uncle Manuel arranged the order of march with care. He was to lead the way on Coronela, and the string of pack mules, fastened, as usual, muzzle to tail, would follow, with Tenorio, Bastiano and Hilario on the tramp beside them. The necessity of detaching, every now and then, one or another of the mules that might be carrying packages for some hamlet off the main route, made so large a number of men necessary. At a considerable distance, in order to avoid the dust kicked up by those forty hoofs, Grandfather, Tia Marta and the children were to follow, and Pedrillo was to act as rear-guard for the entire cavalcade.

The second detachment gave the first so good a start that the mule-train was quite out of sight, when our little troop rode in single file, under a pelting shower, through those narrow Moorish streets. Pedrillo paused at a mat-shop, where the prentices and their master, all squatted on the floor, were weaving the red, brown and yellow fibres of the reeds, to bargain for flexible strips of matting to wrap about Tia Marta and Pilarica, but Tia Marta haughtily declined the attention, although the rain had already run the green and scarlet hues of her umbrella into an unwholesome looking blend. Neither would she accept, for herself, his suggestion that they take refuge, till the shower be past, in the famous Moorish mosque, but she let him hurry Grandfather and Pilarica through the Court of Oranges, whose feathery palms and ancient orange trees were almost as dripping wet as the five sacred fountains, and into the strangest building of all Spain. On this gloomy morning the interior was dimmer than ever and in that weird half-light the marvellous forest of pillars,—hundreds of columns, granite, serpentine, porphyry, jasper, marbles of every kind and color,—seemed to be dreaming of those pagan temples, in Rome, in Athens, in Carthage, from which, in the days of Arab splendor, they had been pilfered by the victorious Caliphs of Cordova.

Rafael had manfully chosen to stay by Tia Marta and, when the others came out, the little fellow was having his hands full with the two donkeys and the two mules left in his charge, while Capitana, who, jealous of Coronela’s honors, had been vixenish from the start, was backing into a pottery shop and threatening with destruction a whole floorful of ruddy water-pitchers, green-glazed pots, buff plates and amber pipkins. Pedrillo sprang to her bridle and dragged her out again before she had done more damage than crush that unlucky umbrella against the lintel, so that rivulets of green and scarlet trickled freely over Tia Marta’s face, which still, despite this gallant rescue, had not the least flicker of a smile for poor Pedrillo.

And so it was day after day as the mule-train, leaving behind luxuriant Andalusia, crept across the rolling pasture lands of Estremadura, Don Quixote’s province, and the sunburnt steppes of Castile. Tia Marta regarded Pedrillo no more than if he were one of the infrequent figures they met on those lonely plains,—an elf-haired shepherd clad in the woolly skins of his own sheep, an old crone with a basket of turnips on her head, a milkmaid balancing on either shoulder a jar wrapped in leaves, a bare-legged peasant with a gaudy handkerchief twisted about his forehead and streaming down the back of his neck. To these she would, indeed, say “Good day” or “God be with you,” in response to the grave courtesy of their Castilian greetings, but Pedrillo might as well have been a gargoyle on a Gothic cathedral for all the heed she paid to his hangdog blandishments.

With Grandfather often asleep, Tia Marta always cross and Pedrillo in the dumps, the children found the advance guard more amusing. Rafael liked to push Shags forward and ride with Uncle Manuel, although, to tell the truth, he did not care much for his uncle’s talk. The practical-minded Galician was not interested in the heroes of Spain and only shrugged his shoulders when told of Rodrigo’s impulsive self-sacrifice. Rafael, on the other hand, was soon bored by details of profit and loss and by tirades against the railroads, fast doing away as they were with the time-honored mule-express. Though now and then some special business would take Don Manuel to one of the larger cities, as to Cordova, in general he served only those remote districts which the railroad had not yet invaded. Rafael would pore over his little Geography and then look off wistfully to the east, till the tawny waste was lost in the hazy blur, and dream of Toledo crowning the black cliff’s above the yellow Tagus,—Toledo, of which his father had told him so much, the ghost-city, now a mere white wraith of its once imperial self. And he was not to see Madrid, either, nor have a chance of taking off his red cap to the boy king. Still, it was grand to ride at the head of the procession and it was only when Uncle Manuel would begin to beguile the way by setting Rafael sums in arithmetic, that Shags was allowed to fall back to a more humble station.

As for Pilarica, she was the pet of the caravan and as happy as the day was long. A yellow butterfly on a scarlet poppy was enough to set her blithe heart dancing. Where Tia Marta saw nothing but endless leagues of arid, barren soil, Pilarica would find, in dips and dimples of that parched tableland, patches of sage and rosemary, wild thyme and lavender, that, trodden under foot and hoof, sent up a cloud of mingled fragrances. The carriers vied with one another in coaxing the child to ride beside them. There was not a mule in the train on whose back she had not been perched, sitting crosslegged like a little Turk between the two big bales. Tenorio would tempt her by gifts. Whenever they passed through a village, and now the poorest hamlet was a welcome sight, with its doorways full of gossiping groups, and its laughing girls, water-jar on head, clustered about the fountain, his lank figure was to be seen stooping over stall or garden-hedge buying sweeties made of almonds and honey, a red carnation or, were there nothing better to be had, a bright green beetle in a paper cage. The shabby Hilario hunted through his ginger-colored blouse and trousers all in vain for one loose copper, but his head was better stored than his pockets and he could allure both the children by starting up a droning chant of some old ballad, as this:

As for the cunning Bastiano, he had only to crack his whip high above Blanco’s untroubled head, and a plump white donkey would charge down upon him, bearing Pilarica to the rescue.

So one blue summer day followed another until—something happened.

It was at the edge of evening, when the still heated air was musical with slow chimes from far-off convent-belfries, whose gilded crosses stood out against the sky. Uncle Manuel was rebuking Rafael for having failed to provide water enough for the needs of the day. Early in the journey—too early, in Rafael’s opinion—Don Manuel had equipped Shags with a wicker frame into which could be fitted four large water-jars, two on a side. As the caravan traversed that central plateau where water is scarce, Rafael was expected to fill the jars at every spring, well or fountain, and give the travellers, especially the tramping muleteers, drink as it was called for. At first the new responsibility pleased him, but he soon grew tired of trudging along beside Shags, who had enough to do with carrying the jars, or of begging a ride on mule-back, and of late he had grown so negligent that more than once the supply of water had been exhausted long before the lodging for the night was reached.

Under his uncle’s reprimand, Rafael flushed, but answered haughtily:

“I’m no donkey-boy.”

“Ah! You were born in a silver cradle, perhaps?” Uncle Manuel asked with quiet but stinging irony. “Are you one of those whom God created too good for honest work?”

sneered Bastiano, who had come up for a draught of water only to find one tantalizing jar after another as dry as his own throat.

Rafael, knowing himself in the wrong, could not retort, but turned abruptly, drew from the mouths of the jars the four fresh lemons he was ingeniously using as corks, handed one to Uncle Manuel, another to Bastiano and, with Shags trotting at his heels like a dog, ploughed back through the deep dust along the train. He, too, was thirsty,—how thirsty nobody should ever know; he was ashamed and wanted comfort. He would join Pilarica who, only a girl though she was, had her values in hours like this. She could always find excuses for him when he could find none for himself. Sisters were made for that. But his clouded look was lifted to mule after mule in vain. She was not with the “cavalry,” for neither Tenorio nor Hilario, who accepted the remaining two lemons as a matter of course, had seen her, as they complained, since the nooning.

Rafael was too warm and weary for extra walking and he waited for the riding party to come up, but when it came, though Grandfather, singing softly to himself, and Tia Marta, in the act of repelling Pedrillo’s humble efforts to ease her seat with the offering of a cinnamon pillow, were there, he saw no Pilarica. Don Quixote, with empty saddle, was plodding along demurely a few rods behind the rest, but when asked what had become of his little mistress, he twitched his white ears with the most non-committal air in the world.

XV

THE EVE OF ST. JOHN

WHILE the caravan halted, all in consternation over the loss of Pilarica, that glad-hearted little maiden was, as ever, on the best of terms with life. To be sure, the nooning had not been quite as pleasant as usual. Though the morning route had led past fields softly golden with the early summer harvest, where reapers in wide hats were wielding shining sickles, the travellers had found themselves by midday on a parched upland, neither shade nor water to be had. After their frugal luncheon of bread and cheese, flavored with onions for the muleteers and with figs for the children, everybody but Pilarica had gone to sleep in such scanty shelter from the sun as the pack-mules afforded. Pilarica had loyally stayed by Don Quixote, who, though his sides were now well rounded out, cast hardly a larger scrap of shadow than the birds of prey hovering in the burning blue, so that the child, too hot to fall asleep, had taken her doll and strolled a little away from the train. Suddenly she saw stretched out at her feet a shabby cloak, propped up a trifle by dry stalks and broken bits of brush, the brown of the cloak so like the brown of the earth that it would hardly be noticed three yards off. Under this homely tent was—of all wonders!—a baby, a really truly baby wrapped in a little white kid-skin, a baby who blinked his black eyes and gurgled drowsily as Pilarica and her doll cuddled down beside him. And there they all three slept so soundly that the bustle attendant on getting the train under way did not rouse them, while Grandfather, supposing that Pilarica was riding with her uncle on Coronela or had been tossed up by one of the muleteers to a pack-throne, himself untied the rope that bound Don Quixote’s forelegs together and chirruped to the donkey to follow Carbonera.

When Pilarica, so exhausted by the heat that her siesta lasted twice as long as usual, finally awoke, a strange, wild-looking figure was squatted close by,—a figure so tanned from the mat of shaggy hair to the naked arms and legs that it looked as if it were only a queer shape of the sunburnt soil. Pilarica, fearlessly creeping out from under the cloak and sitting upright, saw at some distance beyond this unkempt watcher a flock of goats.

The goatherd was devouring a piece of black bread which he dipped, between bites, into a cow’s-horn half full of olive oil. He jumped back as the little girl appeared and stared at her with stupid, frightened eyes.

“Good-day, sir,” said Pilarica, who knew no reason why one should not be as polite to a goatherd as to a grandee.

Scared peasant though he was, he had Castilian manners.

“Will your Grace eat?” he stammered, offering his humble fare.

Pilarica declined with a courteous gesture of her little hand, now almost as brown as his own, and the customary Spanish phrase:

“May it do you good!”

He started again at the sound of her voice, but gulped down the rest of his bread, corked the cow’s-horn, thrust it into his rough leather wallet and then went to his flock, soon returning with warm milk in a bottle. Not daring, apparently, to reach across Pilarica, he pointed to the baby.

“Oh, may I!” exclaimed the little girl in ecstasy and, gathering that kid-skin bundle into her lap, she administered the milk as best she could, singing meanwhile, over and over, one of Grandfather’s lullabies:

The goatherd, to whom Pilarica’s sweet treble had an unearthly sound, crossed himself and backed still further away.

“What is the darling’s name?” she asked, too much engrossed in her new, delightful occupation to notice the peasant’s fright.

“THE CHILD OF HUNGER.”

“The Child of Hunger,” replied the goatherd. He had a few words, at the best, and was, besides, more and more terrified in the presence of one whom he took to be a fairy. For he was but a simple-minded fellow, believing all the tales that he had heard from wandering shepherds on the windy waste or from old wives in rough-hewn chimney-corners. Whenever a lizard glided across his path, he saluted the little green creature with his best bow, for he believed that the lizard is itself so courteous that it will not go to sleep on a sunny wall without descending first to kiss the earth. When his eyes were hurting him, he would watch the swallows in their wheeling flight, for he believed that swallows know of a secret herb that cures sore eyes and that they pluck off its leaves to carry to their nestlings. He always trembled and crossed himself when he came upon even the prettiest little striped snake, for he believed that snakes never die, but when they see Death walking over the plain, looking for them, slip out of their skins and run away, growing into huge serpents with the years and becoming, in the centuries, scaly dragons that devour the flocks. This, he knew, was St. John’s Eve, when, as he had heard since childhood, from every fountain springs forth a fairy princess to spread her linen, white as snow and fine as cobwebs, out to dry in the dew. His young wife had perished of the fever a few weeks before and he could not leave their baby alone in the poor little hut of their brief happiness. So he had, while tending his flock, carried the child about with him, but the little one did not thrive. It would be better to give him to this gentle princess, who, perhaps, had come so far from her fountain to seek a playmate for that tiny fairy-baby with the golden hair and the bright blue eyes that never once winked as they looked out straight upon the western sun. What if the princess were waiting for a herd of elfin goats to bring that dainty creature milk? It would be as well for his honest Christian goats not to meet them. No harm could come to the child in the shining diamond grotto under the fountain, for the christening dews upon the little head would guard it from all evil. So the goatherd slyly picked up his coarse brown cloak and stealthily moved away with his flock, somewhat troubled in mind, for he thought Saint John might better have sent an angel than a fairy to their need, and missing so much the accustomed weight, lighter with every week, upon his arm, that he picked up a young kid and carried this for comfort.

Only the doll watched him as he went,—a high-minded doll that, as the afternoon wore by, showed no signs of jealousy, though Pilarica was utterly absorbed in her new plaything. The baby was almost as good as the doll, sleeping, or cooing, or kicking with its scrawny little legs. Once its wandering claw of a hand discovered an ear and did its best to pull that curious object off to put into the button mouth for proper investigation. It was this failure to detach its ear that finally roused the infant to wrath and it bleated as lustily as if it had been born the tenant of a kid-skin.

“Dear me!” sighed Pilarica, suddenly aware that she was weary and that a great red moon was climbing up over the edge of the world. “Where has the hairy man gone with his goats? Why didn’t he leave us some milk for supper? And when will somebody be coming for me?”

For Pilarica had the wisdom of experience. She knew that somebody always came for a little girl who was lost. For one moment a homesick thought fleeted back to her father and Big Brother and the rustling newspaper doll, and in the next she heard, not at all to her surprise, the trot-trot of Don Quixote’s hoofs and beheld that gallant ass, with Pedrillo running alongside, making over the plain toward the nooning place.

“Cry louder, Baby!” she admonished, with a little shake to which Baby instantly responded. It was really marvellous what a roar went forth upon the air, as if the kid had been transformed into a lion-cub. Clear and shrill above this remarkable accompaniment soared the ringing call of Pilarica. Don Quixote frisked his ears and tail and turned his course toward her of his own impulse; Pedrillo gave a shout of joy, and behind Pedrillo rose the halloo of Bastiano, and behind Bastiano clanged the great copper bell of Coronela.

There was a festival of greeting for Pilarica, but Baby Bunting, howling his worst, had a welcome only from Tia Marta. She gathered the brown bantling into her arms with a torrent of tender endearments and from that hour constituted herself his nurse and champion.

As the days went by, many and sharp were her quarrels with Don Manuel, who was determined that the foundling should be left at the first refuge that offered.

“Do you hope to carry this ugly tadpole on to Santiago?” he demanded at last. “Then let me tell you once for all that I will not receive it into my house. My house,” he added, not remembering to be consistent in the matter of Natural History, “is no nest for screech-owls.”

“Yah-ee!” protested the baby.

“Where’s Herod?” asked Hilario, winking at Tenorio and Bastiano, who mischievously repeated, one after the other:

“Where’s Herod?”

But Pedrillo picked up the child from Tia Marta’s tired shoulder and, dandling it skilfully, walked back and forth till the fretful cry was hushed.

They were enjoying a full midday meal at a village inn, for their lodging-place was so far on it could hardly be reached before late evening. Now that they were getting up into the hill country, where water was more plentiful and the heat not so intense, Don Manuel was pressing on at the full speed of the train in his desire that all, but especially the children, should be at Santiago for the feast of St. James. They were sitting at table in a long open room, at whose further end stood the mules and donkeys, their halters thrown over wall-pegs ingeniously made of ham-bones. Swallows flashed and called among the rafters. Pigeons with rainbow necks flew down to share the crumbs. A dog and two or three cats hunted about under the table for scraps. An enterprising hen, with a brood of fluffy chickens twit-twit-twittering behind her, bore in at the open door with the determined air of a militant suffragette and flew heavily across the room, lighting, to the children’s glee, right on Bastiano’s astonished head. The turkey and the pig, a gaunt black pig with stiff bristles, tried to join the party, but the dog, recalled to a sense of duty, promptly drove them out.

The muleteers were making merry over their favorite dish of big yellow peas boiled to a pap in olive oil, and flanked, on this occasion, by a platter of fried fish, but the children preferred an omelet tossed up in a twinkling out of the freshly laid eggs that they had helped the ventera find in the hay-scented stable. Meanwhile Grandfather was feasting them with riddles and with a treat of roasted chestnuts, singing as they munched:

And again:

At this the ventera, a dumpling of a body with roguish round eyes, held a secret consultation with Grandfather and then stood laughing at Pilarica and Rafael while he puzzled them with an entirely new riddle:

It was not until the doughnuts were spluttering in the olive oil that the children had the answer in their throats, and then it was on the way down instead of up. The carriers, even Don Manuel, came crowding about that tempting kettle, but Tia Marta, her thin face twitching, still sat on her three-legged stool at the table, crumbling her share of the loaf for the chickens and doves, and wishing she could give Roxa a shred of the fried fish. Pedrillo lingered near. Since her absorption in Juanito, as she called the child whom she had taken to her heart on St. John’s Eve, she seemed to have half forgotten her grudge against Pedrillo.

He came up to her now to show her that the baby slept.

“Angelito,” she murmured over it, touching the tiny cheek. “See, it is fatter already! I could make him well and strong, as I made the donkey. But what am I to be? A stranger in a strange land, a servant in another woman’s kitchen, with not even a cat of my own to mew to me. Never before have I been without a child to rear. There were my little sisters first, and then my blessed Catalina, and then her rosy Rodrigo—ah, that cruel Cuba!—and then those cherubs there that Doña Barbara will steal away from me. Blood is thicker than water, though it be water of tears. Ay de mi!”

“But eat, woman, eat,” gruffly implored Pedrillo. “You are giving away all your luncheon. Eat, and your trouble will be gone. Bread is relief for all kinds of grief.”

“Not for mine,” wailed the Andalusian. “Everyone knows his own sorrow, and God knows the sorrow of us all. Are the doors of Santiago so narrow that the gifts of Heaven may not enter in? Oh, this Don Manuel! This Galician with his soul shut in his account book! Growing richer every trip and grudging a few drops of milk as if he were a son of ruin with nothing left for God to rain on!”

“Patience, patience!” urged Pedrillo, his snub-nosed face so intent on Tia Marta that he inadvertently tilted Juanito wrong side up. “Did you never hear of the monk who, as he was telling his beads in his vineyard, suddenly held out his hand to see if it rained? Down flew a thrush and laid an egg on his palm. So the holy man waited, always with his arm outstretched, day after day, till five eggs had been laid, and then week after week, till they had all been hatched out and the fledglings had flown away. Then the mother-thrush, perching on the nearest fig tree, sang to the monk a song as sweet as an angel’s, so that he was well rewarded for his patience.”

“Bah! and how about the ache in his arm? But it is long since you have told me one of your foolish stories, Don Pedrillo.”

And Tia Marta, for the first time since Cordova, smiled on him.

“Ah!” murmured Pedrillo, hastily righting Juanito who was puckering for a roar. “Give the canary hempseed and you’ll see how it will sing.”

But at this critical moment Capitana, who had worked her halter free and whose softly jingling bells, as she ambled down the room, had not been noticed by the absorbed talkers, thrust her long head, with its most solemn expression, in between the two faces that had drawn so near together.

XVI

BY THE WAY

AS the road wound up into the mountains, fresh energy possessed the entire company. Even Carbonera became freakish, while Capitana was more than ever the practical joker of the train. The donkeys ran races. Don Manuel talked less of his winnings and more of the home-coming, though he still threatened Juanito, who crowed defiantly and brandished tiny fists, with the first orphanage they should reach. The rising spirits of the muleteers bubbled over in songs and witticisms at the expense of Pedrillo, whose devotion to Tia Marta, no longer forbidden, could not hope to escape their merry mockery; but that sweet-natured hobgoblin only grinned under their jesting, and Tia Marta, her tongue at its keenest, gave them as good as they sent. Grandfather and his riddles were by this time in high favor with the carriers, and Pilarica, as brown as a gypsy and as eager as a humming-bird, was very proud of the homage paid to his wild-honey learning.

And Rafael’s hurt was healing. He loved his father better than ever, better than in the days of that vague hero-worship, better than when the dear touch was on his shoulder and the dear voice in his ears,—touch and voice that he had missed with such an ache of longing. Now dreams and yearning had both melted into a constant loyalty, a passion of obedience, that was the pulse of the son’s heart. Pilarica understood. To the others he was still a sturdy, black-eyed urchin, ripe for mischief, with a child’s heedlessness and a boy’s boastfulness, but the little sister knew the difference between the teasing Rafael of the Moorish garden and this elder brother, whose care of her, though it lacked the tender gaiety of Rodrigo’s, had grown, since St. John’s Eve, into a steady guardianship.

They had been climbing for two hours, and those the first two hours after the siesta, when, even here among the mountains, the July heat was hard to bear. Springs were no longer infrequent and Shags had been relieved of his burden of jars, but Uncle Manuel, when they were nearing some stream long familiar to him, would find an excuse for sending Rafael on in advance that the lad might have the joy of discovery and announcement. So to-day it was their water-boy, as the carriers laughingly called him, who stood at a turn of the ascending road waving his broad-brimmed straw hat, long since substituted by Uncle Manuel, who had no faith in magic, for the beloved red fez.

“Water! Fresh, clear, sparkling water! Only a copper a glass!” shouted Rafael, imitating the cry of the Galician water-seller so common in the cities of Spain.

“A fine little fellow that!” commented Tenorio, whose long legs easily kept pace, on the climb, with Coronela.

Uncle Manuel tried his best not to look pleased.

“Needs training,” he said harshly. “Needs discipline. All boys do. I set him sums to work out in his head every day now as we ride.”

“Ay, and put him to figuring after supper, when he can hardly keep two eyes open,” grunted Tenorio. “You’ll wear out the youngster’s brains, Don Manuel.”

“The feet of the gardener never hurt the garden,” replied the master-carrier, who prided himself on the practical education that he was giving his nephew.

As the animals came in sight of the cascading stream, they brayed with joy. The donkeys and the riding mules plunged at once into the water, and the carriers speedily released the pack-mules so that these, too, might cool their legs in the pleasant swash of the current.

“Ah!” sighed Hilario, looking up from the bank where he had thrown himself down at full length to drink. “A brook of Galicia is better than a river of Castile.”

“It’s wetter, any way,” growled Bastiano, who had gone some distance up the stream to fill a leather bottle with the pure flow of the cascade. “The rivers of Castile are dry half the year and without water the other half.”

hummed Grandfather, while his eyes followed the play of a sunbeam in the waves.

“Did you ever hear,” asked Pedrillo of the children, as they watched Shags and Don Quixote revelling in the rill, “of that peasant called Swallow-Sun?”

“What a funny name!” exclaimed the little girl. “A thousand thanks, Don Bastiano.”

For Bastiano, who was never surly with Pilarica, had brought his bottle to her before he drank himself.

“He was called so,” continued Pedrillo, “because one day, when his donkey was drinking out of a stream in which the sun was reflected, the sky suddenly clouded over, and the peasant cried out in dismay: ‘Saint James defend us! My donkey has drunk up the sun.’ ”

It was so pleasant by the rivulet, under the shade of the great locusts, that Uncle Manuel permitted an hour’s rest.

“Don’t let us overrun the time,” he said to his nephew, and the men exchanged winks as Rafael, with an air of vast importance, consulted his watch.

Everybody welcomed Uncle Manuel’s decision. Shags and Don Quixote trotted off to a velvet patch of grass and rolled in the height of donkey happiness, their hoofs merrily beating the air. Pedrillo gathered twigs and made a bit of a fire on a broad grey rock, so that Tia Marta might heat the milk for Baby Bunting, who lay kicking on his kid-skin beside her, in the little soft shirt she had knit for him.

“This is not Castile, where I had to dig up the roots of dead bushes for fuel,” said Pedrillo, his face more comical than ever as he puffed out his cheeks to blow the flame.

“It is good to be among trees again,” admitted Tia Marta, “though the pine forests of Galicia are not beautiful like the orange-groves of Andalusia.”

“A bad year to all the grumblers in the world!” exclaimed Hilario in loyal indignation.

muttered Bastiano.

“What have you in Andalusia that shines in the sun like that white poplar yonder?” demanded Don Manuel.

Grandfather, sitting on the edge of a rock with Pilarica nestled against him, made a gesture of reverence.

“The white poplar is the first tree that God created,” he said. “It is hoary, you see, with age.

“Are there good trees and bad trees?” asked Pilarica.

“Yes,” replied Grandfather. “The trees that are green all the year round enjoy that favor in return for having given shade to the Holy Family on the journey to Egypt, but the willow, on which Judas hanged himself, is a tree to be shunned. Yet the birds love the willow, for it gives them food and shelter. Back in Estremadura, where, you remember, we saw scarcely a shrub, no birds can nest, and they say that even the wee lark, if it would visit that province, must carry its provisions on its back.”

“Are all the birds good?” asked Pilarica again.

“Almost all,” replied Grandfather.

But the swallows are best of all, because they used to build under the eaves of Joseph’s home at Nazareth and watch the face of the Christ Child at his play.”

“There was once a bird,” struck in Pedrillo, “a very saucy little bird, who ordered a fine new suit of his tailor, hatter and shoemaker, and then, quite the dandy, flew away to the palace garden. Here he alighted on a twig just outside the King’s window and had the impudence to sing:

The king, very angry, had the bird caught and broiled and, to make sure of him, ate him himself, but the little rebel raised such a riot in the royal stomach that the king was glad enough to throw him up again. The bird came out in forlorn plight, stripped of all his new feathers, but he went hopping about the garden, begging a plume from every bird he met, so that he was soon even gayer and saucier than before. But when the king tried to catch him again, he flew so fast he drank the winds and did not stop till he was above the nose of the moon.”

“Bah!” said Tia Marta. “Stuff and nonsense”

“Rubbish!” chimed in Bastiano. “Pedrillo must have been taught to lie by a serpent descended from the snake of Eden.”

“And what, pray, do you know about it?” snapped Tia Marta, turning most inconsistently against her fellow-critic, “you who are standing off there solitary as asparagus or as that ill-tempered old rat who made himself a hermitage in a cheese,—You who couldn’t tell a story half as good, no, not for a pancake full of gold-pieces!”

“What a scolding deluge is this! It froths and fizzes like cider. It’s a pity there are not stoppers enough for all the bottles in the world,” retorted Bastiano.

“Come, come!” interposed Grandfather. “Stabs heal, but sharp words never. There is a cool breeze springing up. Thank God for his angel, the wind!

The little fire on the rock flared up in the gust, and the children, who, having borrowed all the hats in the company, had ranged them in a row and were trying to outdo each other in jumping over every hat in the line and back again without a pause, came panting up to watch the flame.

“Sing us the fire songs, please, Grandfather,” coaxed Pilarica. She brought the old man his guitar and as the withered fingers moved over the strings, even Don Manuel drew near to listen.

“Ugh!” interpolated Tia Marta, who had burned her finger. Grandfather’s eyes twinkled.

“Don’t forget the one about the charcoal,” prompted Rafael.

“We stack up pine cones for fuel in our Galician cellars,” observed Uncle Manuel. “It is only the stupidest peasants who cut down our splendid chestnuts for firewood, burning their best food.”

“But there is no end to his wisdom!” gasped the admiring Hilario. “Only two more,” smiled Grandfather.

“Those are the sparks,” interpreted Pilarica.

“That’s the smoke,” expounded Rafael.

“And now do let him rest,” commanded Tia Marta, folding her bright-hued Andalusian shawl into a pillow for the white head. “Lie down there by Juanito and be quiet till the start. These children, little and big, would keep you playing and singing for them till the Day of Judgment. It’s your own fault, too. If you make yourself honey, the flies will eat you.”

While Grandfather dozed, Pedrillo put out the fire and tried to talk with Tia Marta, but she perversely turned her back.

mocked Tenorio, but Pedrillo, nothing daunted, set to making Rafael a popgun. This he did very deftly by cutting a piece of alder half as long as Pilarica’s arm, which he measured with great gravity from wrist to elbow. Drawing out the pith, he fitted into the alder tube a smaller stick to serve as ramrod, and everybody fell to searching for bits of cork, pebbles, pieces of match, anything that would do for bullets. Uncle Manuel went so far as to contribute a sharp-pointed pewter button.

So was Rafael, all unconsciously, armed for his great adventure.

XVII

PILGRIMS OF ST. JAMES

FROM time to time, while our travellers took their ease in the locust shade, other wayfarers came toiling up or down the steep and stony road and paused to drink at the stream. There were two strings of pack-mules during the hour, the muleteers passing the laconic greeting: “With God!” A freckled lad of a dozen years or so, in charge of a procession of donkeys nearly hidden under their swaying loads of greens, was too busy for any further salutation than an impish grimace at Rafael. There were boorish farmers, doubled up on side-saddles. There was a group of rustic conscripts, ruddy-cheeked, saucer-eyed, bewildered, their little all bundled into red and yellow handkerchiefs and slung from sticks over their shoulders. There was a village baker with rings of horny bread strung on a pole,—bread eyed so wistfully by a lame dog who was tugging along a blind old beggar that Uncle Manuel, quite shamefaced at his own generosity, gave Rafael a copper to buy one of those dusty circlets for the two friends in misfortune.

Here it was the children first heard the unforgettable squeal of a Basque cart. Far up the mountain road sounded vaguely a groan, a rumble, and then a rasping screech that startled Grandfather out of his nap and made Tia Marta, snatching up Baby Bunting, scramble to her feet in consternation. When at last the yoke of stalwart oxen, with a strip of red-dyed sheepskin draped above their patient eyes, came lumbering down the difficult descent into view, the children saw that they were attached to a rude cart, whose wheels were massive disks of wood, into which a clumsy wooden axle-tree was fitted, grating with that uncanny squeakity-squeak at every revolution. The cart had a heaping load of cabbages, together with a bundle of fodder for the oxen and a basket of provision for the driver, who plodded along beside them.

“What a hideous, horrible racket!” scolded Tia Marta, while Juanito, jealous of this unexpected rival, screamed his lustiest.

“Hush, baby, hush!” soothed Pedrillo. “Hush, or the Bugaboo will get thee. Nay, Doña Marta, that is the music of my homeland. We all love it here. The oxen would not pull without it. Besides, it scares away the wild beasts of the mountains and puts even the Devil to flight.”

“And see those cabbages, the bread of the poor,” exulted Hilario. “Ah, there is no dish in all Spain so good as our Galician cabbage-broth.”

The wail of the cart, that jolted by without stopping, was yet in their ears, when Pilarica, who was still gazing after it, began to dance with excitement.

“O Rafael! Rafael!” she cried. “Come and see! Come quick! These are the wonderfullest people yet.”

She had caught sight of a band of pilgrims on their way to Santiago, to the shrine of St. James, whose festival falls on July twenty-fourth and still attracts devotees from all over the Peninsula, especially the northern provinces and Portugal, and even from beyond the Pyrenees. It was a picturesque group that came footing it bravely up that hot, rocky road. The bright sunshine brought out the crude colors of their homespun petticoats, broidered jackets, blouses, sashes, hose. The women’s heads were wrapped in white kerchiefs, but over these they wore, like the men, broad hats whose rims were caught up on one side by scallop shells. Notwithstanding the mid-afternoon heat, most of them kept on their short, round capes, spangled all over with these pilgrim shells, sacred to St. James. Their staffs, wound with gaudy ribbons, had little gourds fastened to the upper end. Some carried leather water-bottles at their belts, but they had no need of knapsacks, for food was given them freely all along the route and, if charitable lodging failed, the pine groves made fragrant chambers.

The pilgrims paused to drink at the cascade, and the children, while careful not to intrude, ventured, hand in hand, a little nearer. One man came limping toward them and seated himself on a stone. He was making the pilgrimage barefoot, as an act of devotion, and a thorn had run itself into his heel.

PILGRIMS ON THE WAY TO SANTIAGO.

“May I try, sir?” asked Rafael, as the stranger’s lean fingers fumbled rather helplessly at the foot, and instantly, with a twist and a squeeze and an “Out, if you please,” the boy had drawn the thorn. To prevent the embarrassment of thanks, Rafael turned to his sister.

“Sing the riddle, Pilarica,” he directed, and the little girl, Grandfather’s ready pupil, piped obediently:

The dreamy-eyed pilgrim paid no heed to the rhyme, but dropped to his knees, bowed his head to the ground and kissed Pilarica’s little worn sandal.

“For the sake of Our Lady of the Pillar, whose blessed name you bear,” he said, detaching from his cape—which, in addition to the scallop shells, was studded over with amulets of all sorts—a tiny ivory image of the Virgen del Pilar and pressing it into Pilarica’s hand. “Even so she keeps her state in her own cathedral at Saragossa. Ah, that you might behold her as she stands high on her jasper column, her head encircled by a halo of pure gold so thickly set with sparkling gems that the dazzle of their glory hides her face in light!”

A jovial old peasant, whose costume might have been cut out of the rainbow, pushed him rudely to one side.

“Well do I know Our Lady of the Pillar,” he boasted, “and her jewelled shrine in Saragossa, for I am of Aragon, the bravest province in Spain.”

“My father used to live in Saragossa,” volunteered Rafael, with the shy pride that always marked his mentions of his father. “He has told us of Our Lady of the Pillar and of the leaning tower.”

“Ah, that swallow is flown. The tower fell a matter of eight years back. My old wife and I can give you a song about that, for this little honey-throat is not the only musician in Spain. Ay, you shall hear what we old birds can do. The children sing this song, you understand, in dancing rows, one row answering the other, but that wife of mine is equal to a baker’s dozen of children. Look at her! Is she not devoted to the good Apostle to trudge all this way on foot? A long, rough way it is, but many amens reach to heaven. Come forth, my Zephyr! Waft! Waft!”

And he began to troll as merrily as if he had not a sin in the world, cutting a new caper with every line:

Out of the applauding cluster of pilgrims a very stout but very robust old woman, her skirt well slashed so as to display her carmine petticoat, came mincing to meet him, taking up the song:

An ironic laugh broke from the listeners, while the husband, flourishing legs and arms in still more amazing antics, caught up the response:

The old dame flirted her canary-colored skirts and skipped as nimbly as he, replying in her rough but rich contralto:

At this the children looked so surprised and self-conscious that the shrewd peasants guessed at once from what province they came.

roared the man with special gusto, and frisked up to Pilarica, who dodged away in quick displeasure from those open arms.

But Rafael, to his utter horror, was captured by the monstrous matron, who grasped the boy in a pair of marvellously strong hands and swung him, blushing and struggling, up to her shoulder, while, gamboling still, she led the chorus of pilgrims in the final stanza:

Thereupon she enfolded Rafael in a smothering hug, smacked him heartily on each glowing cheek, and then let him drop as suddenly as the tower. Before he could fairly catch his breath, that astonishing old couple had started on with the rest of the Apostle’s devotees, leaving Rafael still crimson with shame and wrath at this outrage on his boyish dignity.

“But pilgrims behave no better than gypsies,” he declared hotly to Uncle Manuel, who had come up to protect the children in case the fun should go too far.

“For him who does not like soup, a double portion,” laughed Uncle Manuel. “You may not always find a kiss so hard to bear. She meant no harm, boy. These jolly peasants will make their offerings and do their penances piously enough at Santiago, even though they frolic on the trip. It is their holiday. There were wild doings along these roads in the old times, I’ll be bound,” went on the master-carrier, who grew more talkative and more genial with every day that brought him nearer home. “Then pilgrims from all over the world, in swarms and multitudes, sinners and saints all jumbled together, wearied their feet upon our stony ways. They say there were popes and kings among them. Be that as it may. There were scamps and fools by the plenty, I’ve no doubt. These mountains were infested with bandits then, who lay in wait to rob the pilgrims of the treasure they were bringing to help build the great church of St. James. Stealing a kiss is the worst that happens now. That is bad enough, eh? Well, well! What shall we do to cheer him up, Pilarica? Shall I let the two of you ride Coronela up this next steep bit? I like to feel Galicia under my feet. Coronela will count you no more than two feathers, while those little asses of yours, who are not used to these long mountain pulls, will gladly be rid of their riders.”

And this is how it happened that, some twenty minutes later, Rafael and Pilarica found themselves proudly leading the train, which they had already left so far behind that, at the second turn of the road, it was out of sight. Before them, however, stretched the straggling line of the pilgrims.

Rafael squared his chin.

“I’ll not risk passing that awful old woman; that I won’t,” he avowed, boldly turning Coronela out of the highway and urging her up the sheer side of the mountain. “Hold on to me tight, Pilarica, for Coronela will have to scrabble here.”

The spirited mule, invigorated by her hour of grazing, took the pathless slope lightly and steadily, but a tumult of calls and laughter showed that the children were recognized and the purpose of their daring detour surmised. Rafael, half expecting to see the rotund figure of the lively old dame leaping after him from crag to crag, recklessly pushed Coronela on. When at last she slipped and slid, struck a level ledge, regained her footing by a gallant effort and stood trembling, they were far up the mountainside, quite shut away from all view of the road by masses of ribbed and jagged rock. Such a wild, lonely place as it was! These rocks, all notched and needled and bristling, had a savage look. There was an angry rock with horns that threatened them, and an ugly rock with teeth that grinned at them. And out from behind the most wicked-looking rock of all peered a man, a red-eyed, haggard, desperate fellow, who had broken jail a week before and, hunted like a wolf, was skulking in the hills, waiting his chance to escape from Galicia and then from Spain. Those bloodshot eyes of his stared greedily at the superb mule and his hand shot out to clutch the bridle.

XVIII

RAFAEL’S ADVENTURE

BY a quick, sharp tug, Rafael swerved Coronela out of reach. To his own surprise, he was not frightened. His mind was filled with one idea, and his will braced to one purpose. He must save his little sister and Uncle Manuel’s choice mule from the peril into which his foolhardy performance had brought them. Coronela could not make speed down that rocky descent. She would have to pick her way and the robber could soon catch her. All this flashed through Rafael’s thought as he jerked the mule aside. The next instant he had leapt to the ground and dealt her a stinging slap.

“Hold on tight, Pilarica! Arré, Coronela!”

The mule, Pilarica clinging to her neck, sprang away and the man sprang after, with the boy in pursuit. Rafael remembered his popgun,—a frail weapon, but it served. It was already charged with Uncle Manuel’s pointed pewter button, and as mule and man turned at right angles from their first course, which had brought them to the brink of a precipice, Rafael dodged in front and delivered his bullet full in the convict’s forehead. It struck with enough force to draw blood that trickled down into the man’s eyes, blinding and confusing him. Before he fully realized what had happened, Coronela had made good her escape, for he dared not give her chase after she had come into view from the road.

With a curse he lunged toward the boy, who, intent only on drawing the enemy away from Coronela and her precious burden, fled back up the mountain as fast as his legs could spin. As he ran, his watch was jolted from its pocket under his belt and, glinting in the sun, bobbed at the end of its chain. He ran well, for all that trudging across Castile had developed good muscle in those stocky little legs, but the criminal who, weak from years of confinement, ran clumsily, was nevertheless almost upon him, when Rafael bolted into a cleft in a giant rock,—a cleft too narrow for a man’s shoulders to enter. Turning to face the opening while turn he could, Rafael wriggled and wormed his way until even a small boy could get no further. Then he stood at bay, not precisely with his back to the wall, but to a granite crack, breathing hard from his scamper, but conscious only of a thrilling excitement.

“Come out of there,” called the convict fiercely, “or I’ll shoot you.”

“Shoot away,” returned Rafael, wondering if the man really had a gun.

He hadn’t, not even a popgun. He picked up a stone to cast at the child, but memory plucked at his arm and held it back,—the memory of his own blithe, adventurous boyhood. For the sake of the lad he used to be, before high spirit had led him on to a rash enterprise that blundered suddenly into crime, the convict’s scarred, unhappy heart softened toward the courageous youngster trapped in that fissured rock.

“Hand out your watch,” he called again, “and I’ll let you go.”

Rafael’s watch! His father’s good-bye gift! The gift that meant his father’s faith in him! No, that father should not have cause again to say that his son was a heedless boy who could not guard his own pockets.

“I will not,” he shouted defiantly.

“Hand it out this minute, before the snakes get at you.”

Snakes! Rafael’s legs jumped, but not his heart.

“I will not.”

“Oh, very good! I’ll leave you for a few days to think it over,” returned the convict, proceeding to wedge a big rock into the narrow opening. Adding smaller stones, he roughly walled up the entrance, so shutting Rafael into a straiter cell than his own too extensive experience of prisons had ever encountered. He meant to lurk again among the crags until the search for the boy should be over and then come back under the starlight for the watch, since a bit of silver in hand might make all the difference to a fugitive between escape and capture. At the least, he could trade it for food and a knife. But the officers had him before nightfall and, in all the dreary years that came after, no thought of his misdeeds tortured the prisoner so much as the remembrance of a little boy he had left to perish in a lonely rock.

Rafael’s chief uneasiness, at first, was about those threatened snakes. What if the crack behind him should be full of them,—clammy serpent coils swaying for the spring! Would they begin at his ankles? He stood first on one foot and then on the other, while he squirmed and twisted out of his extreme retreat. Then he flung himself with all his force against the rock that had been wedged into the opening. It did not stir. He set his shoulder to it; he shoved with a strength that seemed greater than his own; he battered his body against it in desperate endeavor; but it held fast. The boy’s hands were bleeding when he dropped exhausted to the ground, a little huddle of despair. But despair would never do. He was up again and, this time, working with all the skill and patience he could command to dislodge the smaller stones. After an eternity of effort, the highest of these was jolted from its place and fell on the outside, leaving a peep-hole through which the blessed light looked strangely in, as if wondering to find its friend Rafael shut in a den like this. The hole was so far up that it showed him only a violet glimpse of sky, but even that comforted and calmed the boy, who sat down quietly and knit his brows in thought. What would his father tell him to do? His duty, of course. But what was one’s duty in a pinch like this? To get out if he could, and if he couldn’t to behave himself manfully where he was. Nothing could be plainer than that. Rafael decided to call for help, even at the risk of bringing back his enemy, but his shouts, though he did his best, seemed shut into that granite cleft with him. He attacked the great rock again, and the stones, but without any other result than to tire himself out. At last the creeping fear, against which he had been half unconsciously fighting all the time, was getting the better of his fortitude. For one horrible instant he fancied that the narrow walls were closing in to crush him. Again he struggled to his feet. He must do anything, anything, rather than sit still and be afraid. He clambered, often slipping back, up to the little peephole and listened, listened, listened until he heard, or thought he heard, the thudding tramp of the mule-train far down the road and the click-clack, ding-dong, tinkle-tinkle of its assorted bells. Oh, surely Coronela would have gone safely down; surely Pilarica would send Uncle Manuel and Pedrillo to his relief. He must let them know where he was. He must rig some kind of a signal. There was something yet that he could do,—something to save him from the terror.

Nature has her own kindnesses in store for us all, and when Rafael, having rigged his signal, lost his slight footing and tumbled, bumping his head, in falling, on a projecting stone, she promptly put him to sleep, so that he lay untroubled and unafraid on the rocky floor of his prison. He did not hear the excited barking of dogs, as a tall, grave shepherd, his sheepskin garments fragrant with thyme, met a rescue party of mingled muleteers and pilgrims searching the mountainside and guided them to the neighborhood of the cleft rock.

“It was about here, sir,” the shepherd was saying to Uncle Manuel. “I was on that summit yonder and started down as soon as I saw that the young master was in danger. Hey, Melampo! Hey, Cubilon! Find the trail, Lobina!”

“What nice names!” observed Pilarica, fearlessly patting one of the gaunt beasts. Uncle Manuel frowned. This was no place, no errand, for a girl. He had left her behind with Tia Marta. But that grumpy Bastiano, who could refuse the child nothing, had set her on Shags and—it served him right—had had that reluctant donkey to drag up the rough ascent.

“Ay, my little lady,” the shepherd was saying to Pilarica. “All our dogs have these names, for such were the names of the sheepdogs of Bethlehem who went with their masters to see the Holy Child in the stable.”

Pilarica smiled up into the wind-worn face of the speaker with happy confidence. She had noticed him from the road as he stood upon the summit, a majestic figure against the sky, and had thought in her childishness that he looked like God, keeping watch over the world.

“And when the shepherds met the other wise men at the door,” she asked, “did the dogs bark at the camels?”

“Has the girl no heart,” thought Uncle Manuel, “to be talking of such far-off things, when her brother may be—”

But not even in his silent thought could Uncle Manuel finish the sentence. Lobina was sniffing at a fresh red stain upon a stone.

Pilarica saw her uncle’s distress and wondered at it. She did not understand distress. Her soul was still pure sunshine that marvelled at the shadow. But she slipped, for love and pity, her slender hand into his hard grip. In a moment he pushed her, not ungently, from him.

“Take the child back,” he ordered Bastiano. “You should not have brought her.”

“She thought she could help,” growled the muleteer.

“Help! Of what possible help could a girl be here? This is man’s work.”

And Uncle Manuel’s eyes anxiously questioned Pedrillo, who had been on his knees examining the blood-stain.

“Why! I can tell you where Rafael is,” cried Pilarica. “He’s in there.”

And the small brown finger pointed to a tatter of red, that waved, on the end of what seemed to be an alder reed, from a rock near by. “That’s Rafael’s magic cap,—all that’s left of it. He always carries it in his blouse. He has tied it to his popgun. He’s hiding in the rock.”

It did not take the muleteers a moment to tear away the stones that closed the entrance, but when Uncle Manuel stooped into the cleft and lifted out the inert little body, a dreadful silence fell upon the group,—a silence soon broken by Pilarica’s cheerful pipe:

“Rafael! Wake up! It isn’t bed-time yet.”

At that sweet, familiar voice the lids fluttered, and the black eyes, bewildered, brave, looked up into Uncle Manuel’s face.

The Pilgrim of the Thorn, as Pilarica called him, instantly had his water-gourd at the white lips, and Rafael revived so rapidly that he was soon sitting upon his uncle’s knee. He even glanced at his watch, with his usual air of careless magnificence in performing this action, and was amazed to find that only one hour had passed since they left the rivulet. Every man of them wanted to carry him down to the road. The boy hesitated to make a choice, but when the vigorous old peasant-woman, who had puffed up the mountainside after the rest, put in her claim, he decided at once.

“I’ll ride Shags,” he said.

XIX

THE END OF THE ROAD

THERE was still a big lump under Rafael’s hat when, a few afternoons later, our travellers, after a brief siesta, started out on the last stage of their long journey. The muleteers were in the wildest spirits, tossing coplas from one to another and often roaring out in chorus:

Even Tia Marta could not deny the charm of the landscape,—ranges of wooded mountains, reaches of green meadow and of farmlands waving with wheat, cozy farm-houses with broad, overshadowing roofs and a wealth of vines creeping up the white-washed walls, but she waxed ever more indignant at sight of the sturdy peasant-women working in the fields, driving the ploughs, wielding old-fashioned hoes and spades, loading bullock-carts with produce, and carrying boxes, barrels, bales, all manner of heavy and unwieldy burdens, on their heads.

“So that is what a woman’s head is good for in Galicia,” she remarked tartly. “And I’ll warrant that the husbands of these women are spending, out of every four and twenty hours, five and twenty at the tavern.”

Uncle Manuel, who had insisted on having the whole Andalusian party ride at the head of the train with him, that he might point out to them the first view of the pilgrim city, shook his head over this arithmetic, and Pedrillo, festive in a fringed fire-red scarf, ventured to remonstrate:

“Not so, Doña Marta. The husbands emigrate to South America, that they may grow rich there. Some of them die of the Galician homesickness, but others come back with their wallets full of gold. And there are many fishermen, who are oft casting their lines and nets.”

Grandfather caught only the last word, for Carbonera was in a laggard mood, but one word was bait enough to land a riddle:

“We have lost the first day of the feast, but we shall be in early enough for the fireworks, I hope,” said Uncle Manuel. His eyes were shining with an eagerness that made quite another man of him. “Look well to that rogue of a Blanco,” he added to Bastiano, who had come up with a peach for Pilarica. “We must not have any mishaps to detain us this afternoon.”

“Never fear!” growled Bastiano. “If we fall in with a wild boar, we have Don Juan Bolondron and his popgun to defend us.”

Rafael, who had been praised and petted (and forgiven) for his exploit on the mountainside until he was in no small danger of self-conceit, detected something that he did not like in this allusion and looked up sharply.

“Who is Don Juan Bolondron?” he inquired.

“Ask Pedrillo. He’s the story-teller,” replied Bastiano. “I’m taking his place at the rear, and I know why, too.

“Once there was a poor shoemaker named Bolondron,” began Pedrillo in a great hurry. “All day he would sit cobbling at his bench and as he cobbled he would sing coplas about his craft, as this:

“Or this,” struck in Grandfather.

“One day when he was sitting on his bench, taking a bowl of porridge,” continued Pedrillo, “it happened that a few drops were spilled, and flies swarmed upon them, and he slapped at the flies and killed seven. Then he began to shout: ‘I am a great warrior and from this time on I will be called Don Juan Bolondron Slay-Seven-at-a-Blow.’ Now there was in the region about the city a forest, and in the forest a wild boar that liked the people so well he would eat several of them every week. The king had sent many hunters out to take him, but always they ran away or he devoured them, for he was the fiercest of the fierce. One day it came to the king’s ears that he had in his city a man called Don Juan Bolondron Slay-Seven-at-a-Blow.

“ ‘This must be a terrible fighter,’ he said. ‘Bring him hither to me.’

“So Juan was brought into the royal presence. He wore his best shoes, but he trembled in them, though the king only looked at him out of two eyes, quite like anybody else, and said:

“ ‘They tell me, my man, that you are mighty in battle. Is it true that you slay seven at a blow?’

“ ‘It is true, your Sacred Royal Majesty,’ answered the cobbler, who could only guess how people talk at court.

“ ‘Well and good,’ said the king. ‘I happen to have, as kings usually do, a very beautiful daughter, and to you will I give her if you kill the wild boar that makes such havoc in my city. If you fail, by the way, you will lose your head. Choose from my armory the weapons that you like best, and kill the boar the first thing after breakfast to-morrow.’

“So in the morning Don Juan Bolondron, who had armed himself as well as he knew how, went out to the forest, his knees shaking with fright, to slay the monster. But he went so slowly, wondering how, if he should be so lucky as to escape from the boar, he could escape from the king, that it was past dinner-time when he arrived, and the beast, who could not bear to be kept waiting for his meals, rushed out upon him, bristling all over with rage and hunger. When Don Juan Bolondron saw this horrible, flame-eyed creature coming, he began to run with all his might back to the king’s palace and the boar came after, so that it was written down in history as the swiftest race ever known. Don Juan reached the palace first and hid behind the door, while the boar, losing sight of him, dashed on into the patio, where were stationed the royal guards. The soldiers, glad of something to do, discharged their muskets all at once, and the boar, much to his surprise, fell dead as a stone. Don Juan Bolondron, who had peeped out to see how matters were going on, now popped into their midst, drawn sword in hand, upbraiding them with having slaughtered the monster that he was driving in from the forest to give for a pet to the king.

“The king, who was sitting, greatly bored, on his throne upstairs, ran down to see who had called, and when he found that Don Juan had been bringing the boar as a present to his feet, he was so touched that he married him to the princess before supper.

“Unluckily, Don Juan dreamt of his bench and, as he had a way of talking in his sleep, he called to the princess:

“ ‘Here, wife! Hand me my last, will you! The pincers, too! And my awl, wife, my awl!’

“The princess, startled awake by his impatient cries, was naturally much shocked to think that her father might have mistaken a cobbler for a hero. So in the morning she went to the king before he had finished shaving and asked him to look into it.

“The king had Don Juan Bolondron Slay-Seven-at-a-Blow summoned to his chamber at once and thundered, waving his frothy razor:

“ ‘Fellow, are you a cobbler or a king’s son-in-law? You certainly can’t be both, even if I have to cut off your head, after all, to set this blunder straight.’

“ ‘High-and-Mighty Father-in-Law,’ replied Don Juan, ‘give yourself no concern. Her Highness, the Princess, my honorable Lady, though very beautiful, has only a woman’s wit. She was confused with sleep, too, and misunderstood what I said. I was again in my dream taunting the wild boar, as I taunted him when I was dragging him by his ears up the palace steps, telling him that his face was flat as a last, his teeth dull as pincers, and his bite no more to be dreaded than a cobbler’s awl. You see, sire, how a woman, unused to deeds of valor, would fail to understand.’

“ ‘They are such impulsive creatures,’ sighed the king. ‘It is very troublesome. Do you not see, my daughter, how rashly you jumped to a conclusion? Now go in peace, both of you, and don’t come bothering me again with your domestic quarrels.’

“And so,” concluded Pedrillo, “my story ends with bread and pepper and a grain of salt, and I’ve no more to say.”

“I do not care for that story,” said Rafael, who had grown very red in the face.

“But the Princess was right,” protested Pilarica, with a puzzled little pucker of her forehead.

“If the Devil had not invented lying, that shoemaker would,” observed Tia Marta. “But your tiresome tale has not been quite useless, Don Pedrillo. It has put Juanito fast to sleep.”

“And Grandfather, too,” added Pilarica.

“The better for them,” remarked Uncle Manuel, patting the glossy neck of his offended mule, for Capitana had just been so rude as to frisk past Coronela and take the lead.

Pedrillo was quite disconcerted by these frank criticisms and croaked dolefully, pushing Peregrina on beside the impudent, triumphant Capitana:

“What on earth is the matter with the man?” queried Tia Marta.

“There is something I would say to you before we come to the city,” faltered Pedrillo.

“Say it now,” bade Tia Marta briskly. “Of what art afraid, heart of butter?”

“My mother’s son has no wife,” ventured Pedrillo wistfully. “I know,” he went on to say, with his old twinkle, “that choosing a wife is as risky as choosing a melon. I know that there is in heaven a cake kept for husbands who never repented of their choice, and into which, up to this day, no one has ever set tooth—”

“Bah!” interrupted Tia Marta. “That is because no husbands ever went to heaven.”

“My house is only a cottage,” pursued Pedrillo humbly, “and Don Manuel’s house is large and fine. It was a pilgrim inn once and still has the sacred shell of St. James carved over the door. But ‘little bird, little nest.’ ”

“And what would I be in Don Manuel’s grand house?” asked Tia Marta bitterly. “A cook of cabbage broth, without a place of my own to scold in or anybody of my own to scold, not even allowed to keep for myself this child as harmless as a crust of bread, this innocent as pure as a water-jar.”

And she kissed the baby head that nestled so confidingly against her shoulder.

“There will always be room in my cottage and in my heart for Juanito,” promised Pedrillo.

Tia Marta, dropping her look to Capitana’s inquisitive, pricked-up ears, made answer in an Andalusian copla:

“I know I’m not much to look at,” admitted Pedrillo, a trifle aggrieved by the comparison.

“No, you are not,” assented Tia Marta. “Truth is God’s daughter. But you are a handy little piece of a man, and since I have a loaf of bread, I’ll not ask for cheese-cakes. The poor should be contented with what they find and not go seeking for truffles at the bottom of the sea.”

The two were so absorbed in each other that they failed to notice Pilarica, who had ridden up on Don Quixote and was now charging joyously down the line, telling everybody that Don Pedrillo and Tia Marta, while both making believe to kiss Juanito, had really kissed each other. The news was received with peals of laughter, and all the carriers ran forward, voicing saucy congratulations:

“No summer like a late summer,” mocked Bastiano.

“You would better take me, Doña Marta,” advised Tenorio, whose legs looked longer than ever, attired in their festival garb of chestnut-colored breeches, with rows of glass buttons down the sides, “for I have a nose, at least.” And then, turning back, he sang over his shoulder at Pedrillo:

“Don’t trust him, Doña Marta,” teased Hilario, whose shabby suit was set off for the occasion by a red and gold handkerchief. “He loses his heart to somebody every trip.

“A truce to your nonsense!” called Don Manuel, who had urged Coronela on to the crest of the long rise they had been slowly ascending. “Look! Look! Yonder is Santiago de Compostela.”

All gazed in silence upon the pilgrim city, set upon a hill in a circle of hills, its many groups of towers and spires tending upward on every side toward its crowning cathedral of St. James.

Don Manuel beamed upon the group of Andalusians.

“Will you not be happy here?” he asked, his iron face all quivering with joy and love, while the honest Hilario wept aloud and the other three carriers, even Bastiano, did not restrain their tears. “Listen! Where there are church bells, there is everything. Even at this distance I can hear them ringing,—the five-score and fourteen holy bells of Santiago.”

XX

THE TREE WITH TWELVE BRANCHES

“HERE they are!” shouted Uncle Manuel, flinging himself off Coronela and running forward like a boy to embrace his wife and daughter, who had sighted the mule-train from the roof of their house and had come to the outskirts of the city to bid the travellers welcome.

Aunt Barbara, a short, dark, active woman, with a face whose expression was so sweet with gracious kindness that nobody could ever tell whether the features were beautiful or not, gathered the two children into her arms with a low, wordless cry of passionate tenderness. As she held them close, winning even Rafael’s shyness with eager, delicate caresses, they remembered what they had not known their memories held,—the lavishment of love that had cherished their babyhood.

“Mothers must be different from all the world,” thought Pilarica, and pressed, with a sudden yearning for something that her childish heart had lost, into the depths of that ardent tenderness.

Meanwhile Dolores, a merry-faced, cozy little body, in her festal array of wine-colored bodice with cuffs worked in gold thread, her petticoat as blue as a violet, her white kerchief starred with marvellous fruits and flowers, was giving the prettiest of greetings to Grandfather. And Tia Marta was met with a cordial gentleness that readily included Juanito.

“Of course we cannot keep him,” began Don Manuel.

“Wait and see!” laughed Dolores. “You know it will be just as Lady Mother and I say.” And then she flew back into her father’s arms to kiss away his very feeble effort at a rebuking frown.

At once the guests were hurried home to pottage. And such a pottage! Egg and chicken cut into small pieces, bits of ham, red peppers and green string beans! But they could not linger over their plates, for all the world was scurrying through the streets toward the cathedral to see the fireworks.

“Drops of water must run with the stream,” said Uncle Manuel, thrusting his dripping spoon behind his ear, like a pen, in his haste; but Grandfather was too weary for junketing, and Tia Marta could not be persuaded to leave Juanito.

“A Christian child is holier than fireworks,” she declared, standing in the doorway, under the carven cockleshell, with the sleepy baby fretting in her arms.

“And quite as noisy,” came back as a parting shot from Don Manuel, who might seem to have had enough to do, without that, in shepherding his party of women and children through the surging throng.

Although Rafael’s head, still sensitive from the bump, was aching hard when they all came home an hour before midnight, and Pilarica had to pull her hair and pinch herself to keep a certain pair of pansy eyes from drawing their silk curtains, yet both children loyally felt that they must do their best to make up to Tia Marta for the ravishing sights she had missed.

Much relieved that Doña Barbara left it for her to put her darlings to bed, Tia Marta listened demurely to all their drowsy wonder-tales of cascades of fire, showers of falling stars, flaming rivers flowing through the night, golden trees blossoming with rubies and emeralds and amethysts, the colossal lizard that sprang up with a crash, turning to a glistening green dragon that tried to chase the stars, and, best of all, a million-tinted Alhambra which changed, in one splendid instant, to lustrous silver, to an intense and awful white, and then vanished, with a series of deafening thunders, as a sign of Santiago’s victory over the Moors. Yes, Tia Marta listened to everything they could keep awake long enough to tell her, and never once confessed how she had seen all this, and more, from the roof of the house, with Pedrillo sitting close beside her, his hand over hers, to reassure her in case the explosions should be too loud for Andalusian nerves to bear.

The fiesta lasted for several days. There were solemn ceremonies in the cathedral, stately processions through the streets, fairs, sports, open-air music and dancing. Pilarica’s height of rapture was reached when the King of Censers, the great, silver incense-burner of the Middle Ages, swung by a system of chains and pulleys from the vaulting of the central cupola, flashed its majestic curves through the cathedral, a tremendous fire-bird dipping and rising in a cloud of fragrance over the upturned faces of the vast, hushed congregation. But Rafael took a boy’s delight in the eight giants, hollow wicker images some twelve feet high, representing mediæval pilgrims, Moors, Turks and modern tourists, an absurd array that strutted at the head of the processions and even danced, to the music of pipe and tabor, before the High Altar. He was puzzled to understand how they were propelled until he saw peering out at him from the waistband of that chief booby, John Bull, the rueful face of Hilario. A teasing troop of dwarfs were trying to trip and upset this particularly clumsy giant, and Rafael struck in gallantly to the rescue, serving Hilario at cost of a bloody nose. He pelted the dwarfs with melon rinds, while Bastiano, concealed inside the British Matron, John Bull’s towering escort, gathered up his calico petticoats and pounded at them with his pasteboard head. Rafael described this, with high glee, at the supper table, but, remembering Don Juan Bolondron, was silent as to his own exploits.

In the motley assemblage of pilgrims the children came often upon their friends of the road. They were all conducting themselves most decorously now. The dreamy-eyed pilgrim was too deeply absorbed in his devotions for more than a dim smile at Pilarica, and even the wild peasant woman was doing a weary penance, dragging herself on her bruised knees up the long flight of stone steps to the great west doors and on over the worn pavement of the nave to where the enthroned statue of St. James welcomes his worshippers.

After the feast of Santiago there came, in the end of August, the wedding of Tia Marta. Pedrillo had decided, or, rather, she had decided for him, to give up the road and try to make a living out of the soil, whereat Don Manuel, who counted Pedrillo his right-hand man, was sorely vexed.

“Why not leave the world as it is?” urged the master-carrier. “Is not the woman better off under my roof, where she is made one of us and has her spoon in every dish, than living on a mud floor, with goat and pig, in that cabin of yours, munching a crust of bread and an onion? As for you, man, your feet will tingle to be on the tramp.”

Pedrillo scratched his bushy head.

“And Juanito?” he asked.

“Ah, Juanito! He is not so bad, that Juanito. He will amuse my wife while I am away. Now that the little rascal is getting fat on the good, rich milk of our Galician cows, he cries no more than a pigeon. He will soon be playing the screech-owl again on such fare as you can give him.”

“I have heard,” said Pedrillo, “that St. Peter, when he lived upon the earth, was anxious about the rearing of an orphan and told his trouble to our Lord Christ. The Master bade him turn over a heavy stone beside their path. So St. Peter, puffing a bit, rolled it over, and found under it all manner of grubs and slugs living in content. Then said Christ our Lord to Peter: ‘Shall not the care that provides even for such as these be trusted to nourish this dear child?’ ”

“Be that as it may,” replied Don Manuel stubbornly, “every man is the son of his deeds, and life has not made you a farmer.”

Grandfather who, through all the talk, had been smiling sagely and strumming on his guitar, now began to sing:

“Your Honor is as wise as Merlin,” exclaimed Pedrillo, beaming on the singer. “I invite you to my wedding.”

It was on a sunny morning, when the tassels of the maize were dancing in the sea-breeze, that Pedrillo and Tia Marta knelt before the priest in a small side-chapel of a neighboring church. The ceremony was brief. A white scarf was cast over Tia Marta’s head and over Pedrillo’s shoulder, and their necks were tied together with a white satin ribbon, called the yoke. When the ritual of the church had been spoken and the couple had given each other wedding rings, the priest handed to Pedrillo a tray on which were heaped thirteen silver dollars. These he passed to Tia Marta as a symbol of his worldly wealth wherewith he her endowed, and she prudently knotted the coins up in her handkerchief.

“No wedding without a tamborine,” said Don Manuel, who was bearing his defeat with a good grace. So the Andalusian bride, quietly dressed in black with a blue kerchief over her head, and the Galician bridegroom were made guests of honor in a house of loving faces, of music and of feasting. Rafael and Pilarica had strewn the rooms with rushes and wild flowers, and Doña Barbara and Dolores had prepared the wedding breakfast. The main dish, on which Doña Barbara prided herself not a little, was founded on rice boiled in olive oil, but to this she had added chicken, red peppers, peas, salt pork, sausage, clam and eel, and flavored it all with saffron, so that it was, as everybody said, fit for the King of Spain.

Then Pedrillo, putting a brave face on it, started off with Juanito, thrown like a sack of meal across his shoulder, but the baby cooed serenely and kicked out a pair of pink heels in disrespectful bye-bye to the great house of the cockle shell. For once, Tia Marta had no words, but kissed Doña Barbara and Dolores with lips that twitched and trembled.

Don Manuel shook her hand and wished her joy in his blunt fashion. He wanted to venture on a jocose remark, but although she seemed so meek just then, he still stood in awe of the tongue, by which he had been often worsted in their battles over Baby Bunting. “A scalded cat dreads cold water,” he mused, and discreetly held his peace.

Rafael and Pilarica escorted the new family to their home just outside the city. It was a cottage, to be sure, but with a vine-shaded porch, a maize-field of its own and a funny little stone barn standing up on six granite legs and wearing a gabled roof.

As the door was opened, the wind made a slight stir of dust in the empty house.

“Ah!” croaked Pedrillo joyously. “Good Santa Ana, by way of example to the housekeeper, is sweeping here.”

“And I will help her,” cried Pilarica, seizing a bundle of peacock feathers of faded jewel hues and brushing up the hearth. “We have two homes in Galicia now, Rafael.”

“And another uncle,” laughed Rafael, “Tio Pedrillo.”

“O-hoo!” crowed Juanito.

Then Tia Marta, gathering the three children into one indiscriminate hug, fell to crying with all her might, which proved that she was entirely happy.

Autumn came with its harvesting and all the joys of the vintage. Pedrillo, like his neighbors, made his own wine, and Rafael and Pilarica had glorious times stamping, in the lightest of attire, on the grapes in the vat and singing:

The autumn found Dolores more than ever fond of finery. She would don her best cream-colored kerchief, starred with gold, only to visit her father’s sheep out in the heather. One early October evening, when the girl, with shining eyes, had slipped away to join one of the groups of leaping dancers that dotted the fields, Doña Barbara smiled and sighed, and sighed and smiled, saying as if to herself:

“There is no sun without its clouds and no lass without her lovers.”

“I heard that handsome sailor-lad of Vigo tell Dolores that she is so sweet the roses are envious of her,” piped up Pilarica.

“No sailor-lad shall ever enter my door,” growled Uncle Manuel, just back from another trip.

“No door can keep out love and death,” answered Aunt Barbara softly.

Pilarica began to wonder about love and death. People spoke those words in such strange, beautiful tones. And night after night she lay awake beside Dolores to hear a boyish voice, with the hoarse Galician note, singing under the window. At first the coplas were light and playful.

Then they grew so earnest that the young voice would sometimes break with feeling.

For a while they waxed resentful.

But soon they were triumphant.

The winter was colder than the children had ever known, but it brought the same gleeful Christmas, with its almond soup and cinnamon cake, the blessing of the house with rosemary, the dancing before the mimic Bethlehem and the putting out of stubby little shoes on the balcony, a wisp of hay beside them for the camels, that the Three Kings might be pleased and leave some friendly token—a few figs wrapped in a green leaf or a tiny fish made of marchpane—of their mysterious passing in the night. And after the family Christmas—“Every man in his own house and God in the house of all”—there were gatherings of neighbors to sing scores on scores of Holy Eve carols, and then the splendid celebration in the cathedral.

Aunt Barbara, by gentle persuasions of which she alone possessed the secret, induced Uncle Manuel to let her give liberal store of food and linen to households in need, and Tia Marta, out in the granite cottage, held Juanito close as she crooned:

There followed dark, chill weeks when all the tiles took to crying:

And since the new conscription had taken the Vigo sailor-lad away to the war, Dolores, too, wept and wept until her girlish face had lost its dimples and its rosy color.

But Pilarica and Rafael, though they did their childish best to comfort Dolores, laughed the winter through. They searched the woods for flowers, bringing home violets in January and narcissus in March, while Dolores, whom they would coax out with them, bore back on her erect young head a burden of fragrant brush for the evening fire.

Then came Easter, with its springtide joys, and festal summer, bringing new troops of pilgrims to the shrine of Santiago.

So sang Aunt Barbara, and Pilarica, lifting her radiant little face for one more kiss, made answer:

XXI

WORK AND PLAY

RAFAEL still dreamed of his father, especially on gusty nights, and still, as he worked and played, tried to do what his father would approve. For there was plenty of work, as well as play. Work is the fashion in Galicia and neither Uncle Manuel nor Aunt Barbara could have conceived of a happy life without it. Rafael, though he had developed no liking for arithmetic, pegged faithfully away at the simple sums that his uncle delighted to set him and became, if not swift, tolerably sure.

“Dame Diligence is the mother of success,” Aunt Barbara would say cheerfully, when the lad’s face grew flushed over long columns, and presently a purple plum or a russet apple would be dropped upon the blurred and crumpled page. Another of Aunt Barbara’s quiet ways of helping was to divert Pilarica’s headlong rushes upon her brother to impart some news of burning importance,—how Bastiano had promised her a hat woven of rushes or how Don Quixote had slipped off the stepping-stones and splashed down into the brook. Aunt Barbara had only to whisper Bat to send the little girl dancing away out of doors again, trilling like a penitent lark:

What the boy longed to do was to learn to write, that he might send a letter to his father, and a tall youth from the Institute, where Rafael was to go, his uncle said, when he was ten years old, came in twice a week to set copies in a free, flourishing script and make fun of his pupil’s painful scrawls.

“I don’t see why letters are so much harder to do than figures,” Rafael would groan, casting his pen to the floor in an Andalusian temper.

But Doña Barbara would pick it up and pat the ink-smeared hand into which she fitted it again with cool, comforting touches.

she would say in the dear voice that was a softer echo of his father’s, and the five sturdy little oxen would resolutely resume their labors with the plough.

As for play, he found the games of Santiago rougher than those to which he had been accustomed in Granada. He was surprised, at first, to see such big boys dancing in circles, while a lad on the outside would try to touch one of them above the waist, but he soon discovered that these were kicking circles where heels struck out behind so vigorously as to make it no easy matter to tag without receiving the return compliment of a kick.

The work element, too, entered into these Galician games. In the first one Rafael played, he received whispered orders from the leading lad, “the master,” to “be carpenter and gimlet.” After a few more directions, Rafael stooped over, his palms on his knees, and held this position while the other boys in turn took running leaps over him, resting their hands on his shoulders, but careful not to touch him with their legs. At the first jumping, every boy would say in the harsh Galician grumble, like so many leap-frogs at his ear:

On the return jumping-trip, when Rafael’s back was beginning to ache, each asked:

And he, as he had been instructed, made answer:

On the third leaping, each workman paused with his hands on Rafael’s shoulders to put a question to the master and, upon receiving a negative reply, vaulted as before.

At this the last questioner flung his arms about Rafael, pulling the doubled little figure upright, and all the boys dealt him friendly cuffs and tweaks as they dragged him to the master, chorusing:

And then the game began all over again with another youngster secretly appointed by the master as “tinker and tongs.”

Pilarica frankly disdained the Galician games. It hurt the child’s sense of romance and poetry to find the same plays that had been robed in beautiful suggestion, as she romped through them with her Andalusian mates, given this queer, workaday, bread-and-butter flavor. How lovely it used to be when the children would choose Pilarica to lead the Morning-stars in their dancing advances nearer and nearer the deep shadow cast by the Alhambra wall! Within the mystery of dusk would lurk the lonely Moon, waiting her chance to spring and catch the first daring star who should venture to skip across the line dividing light from darkness! How the very words of the song twinkled and tempted!

And here was the same play in Galicia so degraded that Pilarica would never consent to play it. Instead of the Moon in the shadow, a beanseller sat in his stall, and instead of stars there were thieves who scampered over the forbidden border, shouting rudely:

On a certain sunshiny morning of her second autumn in Galicia, Pilarica was protesting to her schoolmates against the game of Hunt the Rat. For Pilarica went to school. The little girl had teased so to be taught that Uncle Manuel, to quiet her, was sending her, at a penny a week, to the dame-school kept in the porch of an old gray church. It was against the church wall that the children were seated in a close row, so that the rat, Pilarica’s shoe, could be hidden between the wall and the small of their backs. As the shoe was shuffled along from one to another, the seeker was teased with the song:

“It’s ugly,” pouted Pilarica. “I don’t want my shoe to be a rat. Why don’t you hunt a golden cup or a fairy or something else that is nice to think about?”

The other children stared and one tall, sullen-faced girl rudely threw the shoe back to Pilarica.

“Because we don’t have golden cups and fairies in Galicia to hunt,” she said, “and we do have rats. That’s sense, isn’t it? But take your old shoe. We don’t want it.”

“These are not old shoes, yet,” replied Pilarica with untroubled sweetness, “because their eyes are shut.”

“Do you mean anything by that?” demanded the sullen-faced girl.

Pilarica put on the rat-shoe, curling her toes with a shiver of disgust, stretched out her feet and sang:

“Mine are wide open,” lisped a midget beside her, tumbling over on his back that he might the better hold up his ragged footgear to the public gaze, but as most of the children were barefoot, the subject was allowed to lapse.

The morning session was half over, as you could see by looking down that row of child faces. Half of them had been washed, and the other half evidently not. Pilarica was one of some five, out of the fifty, that came clean and tidy from home. The teacher, a white-headed grandmother, with a poppy-red handkerchief twisted into a horn over each temple, now appeared scuffling around the corner of the church on her knees, with loud puffings and groanings. She had a hard vow to fulfil,—to go seventy times around the outside of the church on those rheumatic joints, and the gravel was cruel; but she tried to make one circuit every day. Bowing her white head and kissing the lowest step of the porch, she dragged herself up and, sitting down on the alabaster fragment of a long-since-shattered statue, clucked for her pupils to gather round her as a hen would call her chickens.

“We will leave the rest of the faces till afternoon,” she announced. “Some of you may rub my knees, and Pilarica may have her doll and drill you in the scales.”

The shrewd old mistress had discovered that Pilarica was possessed of a little musical knowledge, thanks to Grandfather and his guitar, and so allowed her to bring her doll, essential to the lesson, to school; but its Paris wardrobe and Granada countenance had suffered so much in Galician handling that dolly was now regularly placed, for safe keeping, between the jaws of a stone griffin above the porch. The biggest boy had the daily privilege of climbing up and depositing it there, and the old dame’s rod would knock it out again to be caught in Pilarica’s anxious arms. Battered and tattered as the doll had become under this severe educational process, it was dearer to Pilarica than ever, and she clasped it tight as, standing before the children, she sang in that clear, fresh voice which even the sullen-faced girl gladdened to hear:

After Pilarica and the doll had done their best for half an hour to inculcate a knowledge of the scales, the dame bade the children go and play Kite in the churchyard; but one of them remained.

“Well?” asked the old woman apprehensively.

“Will you please teach me something?” pleaded Pilarica.

“Ay, child, to be sure I will,” and the wrinkled hand drew, from a crack in a wondrously carven pedestal beside her, all the library the school possessed,—a dilapidated primer and a few loose leaves from a prayer-book.

The mistress pored over these dubiously for a while and then her look brightened.

“This is O,” she said impressively, “and that is M.”

“But you teach me O and M every time,” remonstrated Pilarica, “and never anything else. Indeed, I know O and M quite well now.”

The old dame cocked her red horns petulantly and thrust back her library into the marble crevice.

“O and M are very good learning,” she insisted. “Go back under the doorway and say your prayer and don’t come to school again to-day.”

So Pilarica, the corners of her mouth drooping just a little, knelt under the Gothic portal and repeated:

XXII

THE PORCH OF PARADISE

PILARICA was quite at home, by this time, in the crooked, sombre streets of Santiago, whose stones are histories. There fell on her unconscious little figure, as she tripped along, the shadow of ancient buildings,—churches, convents, hospitals, with quaintly sculptured fronts. Over many of the massive, deeply recessed doors was graven the cockle shell of St. James, showing that these were once rest houses for the overflow of pilgrims, of whom thousands used to sleep on the floor of the cathedral. Over the rough granite slabs that paved the roads her little feet danced on to an inner music of her own, though all about her was the harsh uproar of a Spanish city,—children blowing penny whistles, blacksmiths beating their anvils, shopmen calling their wares. The screech of the file, the grating of the saw, the click of the chisel, added their discords to the braying of donkeys, the cracking of whips, the screaming of parrots, the clanging of mule-bells.

Pilarica was glad to come out from the hubbub of the streets into the comparative quiet of the great square from whose midst arises, a dark mass of fretted granite, the cathedral of St. James. About one of its fountains, carved in the shape of the pilgrim shell, were grouped a number of girls, Dolores among them, filling the slender water-buckets of Galicia and lifting them to their heads. They were singing coplas, as in autumns past, but now their songs were sorrowful instead of merry, for the brothers and lovers who had been drafted for the war did not return and slowly there had filtered through, even to Santiago, news of disaster and defeat.

One sad young voice after another made its moan, and Pilarica stood listening with her innocent smile undimmed. She knew these girls, Dolores’ friends, and to her childishness the pathos of their new songs was sweeter than their former coplas of mirth.

It was Milagros who was singing when Pilarica came:

Then rose the shrill note of little Peligros:

The bowed figure of a woman in middle life, moving toward the cathedral, had paused to hear the strains, and suddenly from her there broke a passionate contralto:

The widow passed slowly on into the church, and Pilarica heard a muffled tone, sounding like a sob, that she hardly recognized, at first, as coming from Dolores:

Then soared the pure, clear voice of Consuelo:

Pilarica skipped over to Dolores and pulled at her skirt.

“Will you go for walnuts with dolly and me?” she entreated. “The mistress will not have me in the school again to-day, because I want to learn. We can stop at the cottage for luncheon.”

Dolores looked down at her eager little cousin with kind, listless eyes.

“I must take home my bucket,” she said, “but I will come back.”

When she came back, Rafael was with her. Pilarica had disappeared from the square, but they knew that they would find her in the cathedral, for the cathedral was everybody’s meeting-place, everybody’s resting-place and the playground of all the children of Santiago.

They found her before the so-called Porch of Paradise, or Gate of Glory, one of the supreme works of Christian art. Pilarica was never weary of gazing at it. What was once an outside portico, most richly and exquisitely chiselled, is now enclosed at the west end of the church. It represents Christ enthroned among the blest, a multitude of vivid saints whose faces glow with fullness of joy. On the central shaft of the pillars that support the arches of this celestial doorway is a curious group of slight dents in the agate, where, tradition says, Christ, descending from His bliss above, placed His wounded hand. Pilarica had been guiding an old blind peasant to this sacred column, helping the groping fingers find their way to that strange impress, for all Galicia believes that a prayer offered with the hand placed here is sure of answer. When the grateful peasant had been led, as he requested, to the nearest confessional, Pilarica ran back to see the hand of Dolores set against the shaft, while tears rained down the girl’s wan cheeks as she prayed for her lover of whose death in prison vague rumors had floated home.

“Let us ask for Father and Big Brother to come back,” blithely proposed Pilarica to Rafael. “God might listen better if we asked for one at a time. I’ll pray for Rodrigo and let you pray for Father.”

The boy’s dark eyes were deep with memory, but after Pilarica, standing on tiptoe, had fitted her small finger-tips to those five tiny hollows, worn by faith in the hard marble, his brown hand followed hers.

Rafael tried to pray: “Please, God, bring my Father home,” but a rich, tender voice rose from the past to check the words,—a voice that said: “Wish nothing for yourself nor for me but that we may do our duty.” “May my Father do his duty, dear God,” prayed the boy’s heart in its simple loyalty, and as he lifted his eyes to the saints in Paradise, their glad faces answered his wistful look with a strange, sweet fellowship.

Tia Marta gave them hospitable greeting at the cottage, where Grandfather, over whose mind the mists, dispelled for the time being by the excitement of the journey, were gradually drifting again, had of his own impulse taken up his abode. Both Pedrillo, doing unexpectedly well with the land, and Tia Marta, vastly flattered by Grandfather’s preference, made him gladly welcome. When Dolores and the children came in, he was rocking Juanito’s cradle and crooning over it broken lines of the riddles now fast melting from his memory.

As Pilarica caught up the chubby two-year-old, Dolores quietly drew the cradle out of Grandfather’s reach, for, as all Galicia knows, to rock an empty cradle is an omen of ill to the baby who is next put into it.

Pilarica was pinching, one by one, Juanito’s wriggling toes:

Then Baby Bunting had a chance to show off his accomplishments.

“Kill a Moor,” commanded Rafael, and the pudgy fist shot out straight at Rafael’s nose.

“How many gods are there?” catechised Pilarica, and one pink finger was raised with most orthodox energy.

Meanwhile Tia Marta, who had grown at least ten years younger, was bustling happily about, setting forth white bread and honey and crisp fried potatoes for her guests. Not until they had eaten, did she venture to ask Dolores if there was any word.

“No good word,” answered the girl, her eyes flooding with tears, “and it has been so long.”

“Tut, tut!” said Tia Marta. “God is not dead of old age. Your lover’s feet may be seeking you now. While there is God, there is mercy.”

“There is a buzzing in my ears,” spoke up Grandfather suddenly. “A leaf has fallen from the Tree of Life.”

“Never mind him,” snapped Tia Marta, carefully tucking her best shawl over his knees, “an old canary who doesn’t know what he sings. How Juanito looks up and laughs! He sees the cherubs at play. Be of good cheer, Dolores! Your sailor-lad may come back to you yet, and, if not, God, who gives the wound, will give the medicine.”

“Will Father and Big Brother come back, Tia Marta?” asked Pilarica.

“To be sure they will,” hastily answered the old nurse with a choke in her voice. “God never wounds with both hands. Doña Barbara has enough to bear in seeing Dolores waste away without having to weep for Don Carlos, too.”

And indeed Dolores was but a shadow of the plump, rosy girl who had sported with her cousins a year ago. So changed she was that a ragged wayfarer, resting in the walnut-grove, did not recognize her, although he had carried her face in his heart for many a yearning day. And the nutting party looked down on him and his no less gaunt companion with the easy compassion that views the misery of strangers. Spain had grown used to the wretched sight of sick and crippled soldiers from the West Indies and the Philippines creeping toward their homes. But Rodrigo knew his little sister.

“Pilarica!” he cried feebly, staggering to his feet, and clasping her in one loving arm—his other sleeve hung empty—while, after a long, wondering gaze, Dolores and her Vigo lover drew silently together.

Rodrigo freed his hand for his brother, whose questioning eyes searched that haggard face from which all trace of youth had disappeared.

“Rafael,” said the soldier, meeting the boy’s look steadily, “when the Yankees raised a Spanish battle-ship, that had gone down in gallant fight, they found in the engine-room the body of her Chief Engineer. His hand still gripped the lever. He had died at his post. He had done his duty.”

The lad stood erect, with folded arms, as he had stood by the Sultana Fountain on that April night that seemed so long ago.

“That is a beautiful story,” said Pilarica, who had not understood.

“All stories are beautiful if one has a magic cap,” answered Big Brother, smiling down into the winsome little face, but not with his old gay smile. Yet there was something sweeter in it than before.

“No,” corrected Pilarica, who was kissing the empty sleeve over and over. “It is Rafael who has the magic cap. It turns badnesses into gladnesses.”

“And it will turn this pain into splendor, my brother,” said Rodrigo, reeling from weakness and catching at Rafael’s shoulder with the one thin hand. “Have you a bit of chocolate about you, laddie? How tall you have grown! And how you have come to look like Father! That is his own courage I am seeing in your face.”

“I will run on ahead to Tia Marta, who will make you a feast,” cried Pilarica, so lost in rapture that still she did not catch the meaning of what Rodrigo had said.

“Bread and cheese will be feast enough, especially if Tia Marta adds her pinch of pepper,” replied Rodrigo, with a queer little ghost of a laugh. “The Geography Gentleman—Heaven reward him!—cared for me and a dozen more of us at Granada and gave me gold for the railroad journey north to you; but there were so many of my half-starved comrades on the train that the money was all gone before we had reached Leon and I have been walking and living on the charity of berry-bushes and walnut-trees ever since. But bide a wee, Caramel Heart! I have grand news for you. You are to go to school,—a real girls’ school. What do you think of that? It is in charge of a lady from over the sea, Doña Alicia, a lady who loves Spain and was kind to us poor fellows in the hospital. Father would, I know, be glad to have you go to her and learn.”

“It will be lovely to learn,” trilled Pilarica, the leaves rustling a song of their own under her tripping feet. “And when Father comes home, we’ll be just as happy under the sky as the angels are on top. Grandfather says they dance all night and sometimes they jostle down a star. And Father will come home soon, for the pillar prayers are always answered. Only see! Dolores’ prayer and mine are answered already.”

“Mine was answered first,” said Rafael, and his voice, though a sob broke through it, was proud,—the voice of a hero’s son.

LIST OF SPANISH WORDS, PRONOUNCED AND DEFINED

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z

Abdorman Murambil Xarif. (Ab-dōr´-mahn Moor-ahm´-beel Xah-reef´.)

There is much reason to fear that this Moorish name was made up by Rafael.

Adolfo. (Ah-dŏl´-fo.)

Adolphus. Adolph. A boy’s name meaning Noble Wolf.

Augustin. (Ah-goos-teen´.)

Augustus. Austin. A boy’s name meaning August, Exalted, Imperial.

Alameda. (Ah-la-meh´-dah.)

A shaded walk, as through a park.

Alfonsito. (Al-fŏn-see´-to.)

Little Alfonso.

Alfonso. (Al-fŏn´-so.)

Alphonso. A boy’s name meaning Ready. The present king of Spain is Alfonso XIII.

Alhambra. (Al-hăm´-brah.)

The famous fortress and palace built by the Moors on a hilltop overlooking Granada. The name is Arabic and means Ruddy, perhaps from the color of the stone.

Ana. (Ah´-nah.)

Anna. Hannah. Anne. A girl’s name meaning Gracious. St. Anne, the mother of the Madonna, is much beloved in Spain.

Angelito. (An-hel-lee´-to.)

Little angel.

Arnaldo. (Ar-năl´-do.)

Arnold. A boy’s name meaning Strong as an Eagle.

Arré. (Ar´-ray.)

Gee. The shout of a Spanish driver in urging on his mule.

Arriero. (Ar-re-er´-o.)

Muleteer; carrier.

Ay de mi. (I´ day mee´.)

Alas, poor me!

Bastiano. (Bäs-te-ah´-no.)

Short for Sebastiano. Sebastian. A boy’s name meaning Reverend. St. Sebastian, a brave and beautiful young martyr shot all over with arrows, is a favorite saint in Spain and Italy.

Bavieca. (Bah-ve-ā´-ca.)

The name of the Cid’s horse, mentioned in almost every one of the hundred ballads of the Cid.

Benito. (Bā-nee´-to.)

Benedict. A boy’s name meaning Blessed.

Bernardo del Carpio. (Ber-nar´-do del Car´-pe-o.)

A Spanish warrior of the eighth or ninth century. The king long held the father of Bernardo in cruel imprisonment and when at last obliged to restore the captive, had him murdered in his dungeon, mounted the dead body, in full armor, on horseback, and sent that forth to the expectant son, who, in his grief and rage, went over to the Moors. See page 84.

Blanco. (Blan´-co.)

White. In this story, the name of a white mule.

Bolondron. (Bō-lon-drŏn´.)

A sonorous name fit for a braggart.

Brasero. (Brä-sā´-ro.)

Brasier. A pan for holding burning coals.

Cadiz. (Cä´deth. More often pronounced by the Andalusians Cä´-de.)

A fortified city on the southern coast of Spain.

Capitana. (Cah-pe-tah´-nah.)

Captainess. In this story, the name of a mule who insists on taking the lead.

Carbonera. (Car-bon-er´-ah.)

Derived from carbon (car-bone´), meaning charcoal. In this story, the name of a soot-colored mule.

Carlos. (Car´-los.)

Charles. A boy’s name meaning Noble of Spirit.

Carmencita. (Car-men-thee´-tah.)

Little Carmen. A girl’s name.

Catalina. (Cah-tah-lee´-nah.)

Catherine or Katharine.

Celestino. (Thel-es-tee´-no.)

Celestine. A boy’s name not uncommon in Spain.

Cid. (Pronounced in English, Sĭd; in Spanish, Thed.)

An Arabic word, meaning lord, given as a title of honor to Rodrigo (Ro-dree´-go) or Ruy (Roo´-e) Diaz (Dee´-ath) de Bivar (Be-var´), a Spanish hero of the eleventh century.

Cigarron. (Thie-gar-rón.)

The word, meaning a big cigar, appears in this story as a surname.

Compostela. (Com-po-stā´-lah.)

This word, derived from the Latin, Campus Stellae, the Field of the Star, keeps in the name of the City of St. James a memory of the bright star which, according to the legend, pointed out his burial place in Galicia.

Consuelo. (Con-soo-āl´-o.)

Consolation; comfort. Many a Spanish girl is called Consuelo, the full form being Maria (Mah-ree´-ah) del Consuelo, Mary of Comfort, one of the names of the Madonna.

Copla. (Co´-plah.)

A stanza, usually a couplet or quatrain.

Coronela. (Co-ro-nā´-lah.)

Derived from corona (co-rōn´-ah), meaning crown. In this story, a mule of crowning excellence.

Cubilon. (Coo-be-lōn´.)

See pages 235-236.

Darro. (Där´-ro.)

A deep-gorged river dividing the Alhambra hill from the hill where the gypsies of Granada live in caves.

Diego. (Dee-ā´-go.)

James. Jacob. A boy’s name meaning the Supplanter. St. James the Apostle was for centuries the Patron Saint of Spain.

Dolores. (Dō-lōr´-es.)

Sorrows. The full form of the name Dolores, common among Spanish girls, is Maria (Mah-ree´-ah) de los (lōs) Dolores, Mary of the Sorrows.

Don. (Dŏn.)

A title of respect for a man; Mr., but used only before the Christian name. See Señor.

Doña. (Dō-nyä.)

A title of respect for a woman; Mrs., but given to unmarried women as well as married, and used only before the Christian name.

Ernesto. (Er-nĕs´-to.)

Ernest. A boy’s name meaning Earnest.

Estremadura. (Es-trā-mah-doo´-rah.)

A tableland in the west of Spain, lying north of Andalusia and between New Castile and Portugal.

Fiesta. (Fe-es´-tah.)

Festival.

Francisco. (Frän-thēs´-co.)

A boy’s name, meaning Free, common in Roman Catholic countries, for there are at least five saints of this name. The dearest of them all is the gentle Italian, St. Francis of Assisi (As-see´-zee), who loved the poor so well it was said he had taken Lady Poverty for a bride, and who looked upon all beasts and birds as his own brothers and sisters.

Giralda. (He-rahl´-dah.)

The bell-tower of Seville cathedral. See page 58.

Granada. (Grah-nah´-dah.)

The meaning of the word is pomegranate, and this fruit is emblazoned in the arms of the Andalusian city of Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain.

Guilindon. (Gee-lin-dōn´.)

See page 165.

Hilario. (E-lah´-ree-o.)

Hilary. A boy’s name meaning Merry.

Isabel. (E-sah-bel´.)

Isabel; Elizabeth; Betsy. A girl’s name meaning Consecrated to God.

Isabelita. (E-sah-bel-ee´-tah.)

Little Isabel.

José. (Hō-zay´.)

Joseph. A boy’s name meaning He Shall Aid. St. Joseph, the husband of the Madonna, is very popular in Spain and many boys bear his name. Girls are often called Josefa. (Hō-zāy´-fa.)

Juan. (Hoo-ahn´.)

John. A boy’s name meaning The Gracious Gift of God. In this story, it is on the Eve of St. John the Baptist, June 24, that Pilarica finds the baby, not on the Eve of St. John the Evangelist, which falls in the winter, December 27.

Juanito. (Hoo-ahn-ee´-to.)

Little John.

Larán-larito. (Lär-än´-lär-ee´-to.)

A musical group of syllables for a ringing refrain, as Tra-la-la or Trolly-lolly.

Leandro. (Lay-ahn´-dro.)

Leander. A boy’s name meaning Lion-Man.

Leon. (Lay-ōn´.)

The name of a province lying west of Old Castile and also of its capital city.

Lobina. (Lo-bee´-na.)

She-wolf. See pages 235-236.

Lorenzo. (Lo-rĕn´-zo.)

Laurence. A boy’s name meaning Crowned with Laurel. St. Laurence was a Spaniard and bore himself with true Spanish nonchalance even when suffering the martyrdom of being roasted on a gridiron. “I am done on this side,” he said. “Turn me over.”

Lorito. (Lō-ree´-to.)

A pet name from loro (lō´-ro), parrot, like our Polly. Parrots are very common pets in Spain, especially in Andalusia, where they sometimes mock the schoolboys by shrieking from their balcony perches:

Madrid. (Mah-dred´.)

The capital city of Spain, almost at the geographical centre of the Peninsula.

Malaga. (Mah´-lah-gah.)

A fine old seaport on the southern coast of Spain. Malaga grapes go the world over.

Mambrú. (Mahm-broo´.)

A folk-song name for a soldier.

Manta. (Mahn´-tah.)

A horse-cloth.

Manuel. (Mah-noo-āl´.)

Emanuel, Emmanuel. This sacred name, meaning God With Us, is often given to Spanish boys.

Maria. (Mah-ree´-ah.)

Mary. This beautiful name, variously interpreted as meaning Bitter, Rebellion, Star of the Sea, is a favorite for girls in all Christian lands, and in Spain, which believes itself under the special protection of the Madonna, is often given to boys as well, being in such cases one among the several names that a Spanish child usually carries. See page 89.

Mariana. (Mah-ree-ah´-nah.)

Marian, Marion. Another form of Mary.

Marta. (Mah´-tah.)

Martha. A girl’s name meaning The Ruler of the House; also, Melancholy.

Melampo. (May-lam´-po.)

See pages 235-236.

Mercedes. (Mer-thā´-des.)

Mercy. Not unusual among the names of Spanish girls.

Milagros. (Mee-lah´-grōs.)

Miracles. The full name would be Maria de los Milagros.

Moreto y Hernandez. (Mo-ray´-to ee Er-nahn´-deth.)

It is customary in Spain for one to keep, as here, the surnames of both father and mother, united by y meaning and. See page 89.

Murillo. (Moo-ree´-lyo.)

A famous Spanish painter of the seventeenth century. See page 168.

Patio. (Pah´-te-o.)

An open court. See pages 90 and 102.

Pedrillo. (Pay-dree´-lyo.)

Little Peter. From Pedro (Pay´-drō), Peter, meaning A Rock.

Peligros. (Pay-lee´-gros.)

Perils. The full name would be Maria de los Peligros.

Pepito. (Pay-pee´-to.)

Little Joe. A pet-name from José.

Peregrina. (Pay-ray-gree´-nah.)

Pilgrim. In this story, the name of a mule.

Peseta. (Pay-say´-tah.)

A silver Spanish coin, looking much like our quarter dollar, but worth only about twenty cents.

Pilar. (Pe-lar´.)

Pillar. Many Spanish girls are called Pilar, the full name being Maria del Pilar, after the Madonna of Saragossa. See pages 221-222.

Pilarica. (Pe-lah-ree´-kah.)

Little Pilar.

Pinta. (Pin´-ta.)

In the circle-dances, the name of a bird.

Puchero. (Poo-chay´-rō.)

A stew made up of beef or lamb, ham or bacon, chickpeas and other vegetables,—a standing dish in all Spanish countries. See page 173.

Quixote. (Ke-hō´-tā.)

Don Quixote is the hero of a celebrated Spanish romance by Cervantes (Ther-vän´-tes). See page 76. Our word quixotic is derived from Don Quixote.

Rafael. (Rah-fah-el´.)

Raphael. A name, meaning The Healing of God, often given to boys in Italy and Spain. Raphael the Archangel, deemed the guardian of all humanity and especially of the young and of travellers, is a saint of the church calendar.

Rita. (Ree´-tah.)

See page 3.

Rodrigo. (Ro-dree´-go.)

Roderick. A boy’s name meaning Rich in Fame,—a name famous in the early history of Spain.

Rocinante. (Rō´-the-nahn´-tay.)

A name, meaning a wornout old cab-horse, that Don Quixote gave to his gaunt steed.

Rosita. (Rō-see´-tah.)

Little Rose. A pet-name from Rosa (Rō-sah.)

Roxa. (Rō-xah.)

Roxana, meaning Dawn of Day. In this story, the name of a cat.

San. (Sahn.)

Saint. The feminine form is Santa (Sahn´-tah.)

Sancho Panza. (Sahn´-ko Pahn´-thah.)

The name, suggesting a round body set on spindle-shanks, is that of Don Quixote’s esquire. Don Quixote, the very soul of romance, arming himself in what seemed to everybody else a ridiculous fashion, rode forth on his lean nag to redress the wrongs of the world, and after him jogged Sancho Panza, on his donkey Dapple, a goblin of commonsense.

Santiago. (Sahn-te-ah´-gō.)

St. James; also the city called by his name. The full name of this Galician city is Santiago de Compostela.

Señor. (Say-nyōr´.)

Sir. Used as Mr. before the surname, not, like Don, before the Christian name. In this story, the children’s father would be addressed by friends as Don Carlos; by strangers as Señor Moreto.

Señora. (Say-nyor´-ah.)

Madame. Used as Mrs. before the surname, not, like Doña, before the Christian name.

Señorito. (Say-nyōr-ee´-to.)

Young sir.

Serení. (Say-ray-nee´.)

See pages 33-34.

Sierra Nevada. (Se-er´-rah Nay-vah´-dah.)

Nevada is an adjective from nieve (ne-ay´-vay), snow; the first meaning of sierra is saw; so that Snowy Saw is the literal name given to the white, keenly cleft mountain-range of southern Spain.

Siesta. (Se-es´-tah.)

The nap after the midday meal, in the heat of early afternoon.

Sombrero. (Som-bray´-ro.) Hat.

Sultan. (Sool-tahn´.)

In Moorish and Turkish lands, Sultan is the title given to the emperor.

Sultana. (Sool-tah´-nah.) Empress.

Teresa. (Tay-ray´-sah.)

Theresa. This name, which means Carrying Ears of Corn, is often given to Spanish girls, because of the sixteenth-century mystic and reformer, Santa Teresa, who was born in Castile.

Tia. (Tee´-ah.) Aunt.

Titirinela. (Te-te-re-nay´-lah.)

A group of singing syllables much like Hey diddle diddle.

Toledo. (To-lay´-dō.)

The oldest and most wonderful city of Castile. See page 186.

Tenorio. (Tay-nō´-re-oh.)

In this story, the name of a tall, thin muleteer.

Ventera. (Ven-tay´-rah.) The woman who keeps an inn. The venta (ven´-tah) in Spain is a poor tavern by the wayside, not so good as the posada (po-sah´-dah) and far inferior to the hotel.

Vigo. (Vee´-go.) A seaport of Galicia.

Virgen. (Veer´-hen.)

Virgin. The Madonna of Saragossa is known as Virgin del Pilar.

Xarifa. (Xah-ree´-fah.)

Xarifa is a Moorish name for a woman. It is used with fine musical effect in Lockhart’s ballad The Bridal of Andalla. There is nothing better than Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads to fill one’s mind with the romance of Spain.

Zinga. (Zin´-gah.) A general name for gypsies in Spain is Zingari (Zin´-gah-e). In this story, Zinga is the name of a gypsy-girl.

Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:

fragant air=> fragrant air {pg 102}