"Our husbands, our children, To the Indies still roam, In search of the fortune Lying hidden at home."
I.
"Say, ma, this blouse is badly made, though!"
"Oh, you ungrateful rascal! Why, it fits you like your skin!"
"Nonsense, ma, I tell you it's too tight all over, and when I try to take off my hat the flaps work up round my neck!"
"Off with you, you impertinent little scamp, and don't stay here, bothering me!"
"Well, ma, you may as well give up fine sewing, anyway, and that good-for-nothing sister of mine, too! Just look at her now! She holds her needle as if it were a crowbar! My eye, look at what a shirt she's making! Now just try and make those stitches finer, can't you?"
"Oh, you rogue! Since when have you come to be a judge of fine sewing, and a howling swell yourself? And here I've been slaving for you night and day for more than a month! Mamma, I won't sew another stitch for him!"
And the unappreciated seamstress, a robust young girl, as brown as a chestnut, threw on the floor the shirt she had been sewing, and turned her back resolutely on the critical little dandy of thirteen, swift as a squirrel and thin as a rail.
His mother, some forty years of age, although the wrinkles in her face and the stoop of her shoulders give her the look of a woman of sixty, after struggling to make her thread fine enough to go through the eye of the needle, which is almost lost in her callous fingers, soothes the susceptible little sewer, goes up to the boy, makes him turn round three times, gives a vigorous pulling down to the garment he has criticised, and after gazing at her work for a moment in silence, she sits down again, exclaiming in a tone of deepest conviction, "Well, I'd like to see the tailor who could make you a better fit!"
But before proceeding with our story, and that our readers may better understand the situation, we will pause here to explain matters.
That our characters have their home in the mountains should be evident from the style of the above dialogue, and in case that has not made it sufficiently clear, I may state just here that such is the case. The reader may locate the scene of the story in that part of this province which best suits him, but the scene I am about to describe is found oftenest in the eastern part. [I. e., about Santander.]
The stage setting in this case is the wide porch with red-tiled roof of a poor villager's cottage. The front of this cottage, like most of its kind, has in its center the main door, to the left the door of the sitting-room, to the right the kitchen window.
The two women are sewing, seated in the doorway. The second door stands partly open, as the good Uncle Nardo, the head of the family, husband and father respectively of the characters in our dialogue, has just gone in to settle up his accounts. As for the window, although this is an unnecessary detail, I will state on the word of a veracious historian, that it was closed; for its real use, more than to let light into the kitchen, is to let out the smoke when there is a fire in the fireplace, which just now is as cold as the mush that has been cooking there in the morning,—their food for the day. And we will add that it is now afternoon, stating also, and this is no idle detail as it may seem at a first glance, that we are in the month of September.
And now we have only to relate further that the little fellow who made such weighty charges against his mother and sister, came up to the porch, attired in a complete suit of gray nankeen, his neck tightly swathed in the intricate and tumultuous folds of an enormous cravat of red and white checked cotton. His small and intelligent face was almost hidden under the wide brim of his straw hat, adorned with a green band, and on his feet, to complete the picture, were clumsy, heavy shoes. The dust that covered them, the lad's flushed face, and the stout stick he carried, showed clearly that he had just come from a long walk. As for his grounds for complaint concerning the maternal shears and his sister's needle, we cannot deny that they appear well founded, after close examination of his clothing. At the same time it is evident that the poor women had never seen anything better in their way, and that the disdainful little fellow had never before rejoiced in such fine feathers as those which now embarrassed him. We can also affirm that, in spite of his opening speech, there is a certain gleam of pleasure, a smile on his face, which would seem to denote an inner satisfaction; his journey must have had a satisfactory ending.
But to understand this and other things which we propose to relate, let us take up our story where we left it before making this digression.