Donna Perpetua and her husband welcomed Antonio with proprietary airs. Towards José they were sufficiently gracious, and Donna Perpetua expressed her pleasure at the sight of the speechless fellow's mandolin. Luiz and his brothers were already hard at play on the threshing-floor; but of Margarida nothing was to be seen. Perhaps, thought Antonio, she was sitting among the group of young men and women who were husking maize on the sheltered side of the threshing-floor. The night was warm and balmy. From the south-west a few clouds had begun to rise: but the round moon was riding free, high among the sparkling stars. A tinkling of guitars and the chattering and light laughter of youths and maidens rippled the surface of the enormous silence. The scene was almost as bright as day. Here a girl's gold ear-ring, there a man's buckles or buttons of old silver, caught and flung back the faerie light. Some of the older women were spinning. Eight-pointed wooden wheels whirred round, buzzing like bees. A youth as handsome as a god lolled on a log, carving an ox-yoke. Where the maidens sat all together, the colors were like peacocks' tails and rainbows; and it was there that the moonlight lingered wantonly on plump arms and little ivory hands. A clapping of palms proclaimed the end of the game, and Luiz made haste to begin another. He and Affonso climbed up two poplars, one on the north side of the threshing-floor, the other on the south; and to these trees they tied the two ends of a thin rope, so as to stretch it at a height of eight or nine feet from the ground. Before making his end fast, Luiz passed it through the handle of a coarse brown jug. Descending to the ground, he picked up a six-foot clothes-prop, made from the dried stalk of a giant cabbage, and with this he shoved the jug along the rope until it dangled absurdly over the center of the floor. Then he produced a clean white handkerchief and sang out for the first player. The youth who had been carving the ox-yoke dropped his work and leaped into the ring like a Greek athlete into the arena. Everybody clapped hands again. The handkerchief was bound over his eyes and the light pole was placed in his hand. Luiz turned him three-quarters round; clutched his arm and walked him half-a-dozen paces this way and that; and then, retreating to the edge of the floor, began to count a hundred, loudly and quickly.