"The soldiers, mamita!" said the boy laughing, and patting her cheek with his little hand; "I have never seen a soldier, but when I am big like this one then I will put myself to kill the English. All of them, mamita, all of them."
As he said this he struggled from his mother's arms, and rolling over a cushion, clambered down from the estrade, and running up to Lieutenant Gordon clenched his little fist and struck him on the leg.
"This is one," he said; "some day when I am big I will kill you."
Marcelino rose hurriedly from his chair, and Don Fausto walked quickly to the spot with a look of great annoyance on his face, but Gordon stooping down to the boy lifted him up in his arms and kissed him, saying with a merry laugh:
"When you are as big as I am, my little man, we English will be great friends with you, and will know better than to come here to fight you."
"Thanks, my friend, thanks," said Don Fausto, taking his free hand in both his own. "With years we shall all of us learn a little wisdom."
Justiniano looked wonderingly from one to the other with a finger in his mouth to aid his reflections, then seizing hold of one of Gordon's whiskers he whispered in his ear:
"You no, don't be frightened, you are not one of the bad ones. Always we will be friends."
"Mind you remember that, little rascal," said Marcelino, patting him on the cheek.
"If he ever forgets it you will remind him," said Gordon: then raising the boy to his shoulder he danced with him up and down the long room, the child shouting and tossing his arms about with delight.
Doña Josefina, the boy's mother, had meanwhile sunk back again upon her cushions, following him with her eyes, and seemed to care little whether Marcelino resumed the conversation or not, but there were other ladies there younger than she, who had listened eagerly to what Marcelino had told them of the English invasion, and wished to hear more. The twilight deepened into darkness, the mate-pot ceased its rounds amongst them, lamps were lighted, fresh faces were seen in the room, and others who had been there disappeared, but still Marcelino talked on in glowing, enthusiastic language of the changes during the last sixteen months in the city of Buenos Aires, and of the greater changes which he foresaw in the future. He had often talked thus before among men of his own age and of his own class, and he had seen weariness in their faces, and scorn curling on their lips; he had talked thus to men his seniors in age, and had been treated as a visionary, or had been silenced by a stern rebuke; but here he found an audience who hung upon his words, who sympathised in his hopes, and saw no folly in his wildest aspirations; it was an audience of women, of women learned in needlework and household lore, skilled in the art of dressing themselves and making the most of the natural graces to which they were born, of beautiful women who could barely write their own names, who knew little of the world in which they lived, and nothing of the world which had passed away. These women were incapable of following out the abstruse reasonings by which at times he sought to elucidate his argument, the illustrations he drew from history conveyed no lesson to their minds, his logic was thrown away upon them, yet they understood him and sympathised with him, and learned from him to believe that their country would one day be a great nation, governed by its own laws, and free from all foreign control.