"You are mine, forever, forever, through time everlasting!"
Just then they heard a great commotion, and the sound of many voices
crying,--
"It is time! it is time!"
The clock struck twelve, and all had disappeared, princess, palace,
dolls, and emperors. Pacorrito was left alone.
XIII.
He was left alone in the most complete darkness. He tried to scream,
but he was voiceless. He made frantic attempts to move, but he could
not; he had turned to stone.
He waited in anguish. Day dawned at last; and Pacorrito had resumed
his old appearance, but strange to say, he was all of one color, and
apparently all of one substance,--his hands, his arms, his rags, his
hair, and even the newspapers which he held in his hand.
"There is no doubt about it," said he; "I have turned into a stone."
Before him he saw a great sheet of plate-glass, with some letters on
it, running backward. Around him was a multitude of statuettes and
fancy ornaments.
"Horror! I must be in the show-window!"
A clerk took him carefully in his hands, and having dusted him, put
him back in his place.
His Serene Highness looked down upon the pedestal on which he stood,
and saw a card with the figures $12.00 upon it.
"Good heavens! I am worth a treasure! That, at least, partially
consoles one."
And the people stopped on the other side of the plate-glass to admire
the wonderful bit of clay statuary representing a ragamuffin selling
matches and newspapers. Everybody praised the artist, and laughed at
the droll expression and bungling figure of the great Migajas, while
he in the inmost recesses of his clay repeated in anguish,--
"A puppet! a puppet! forever! through time everlasting!"
A TRAGEDY.
From the Spanish of ANTONIO MARÉ.
It was a great city in the far North, a gloomy city with pointed
roofs that seemed to have been carved out of the fog. The birds that
hurried past it on their journey south said to themselves that it
looked like a forest of steeples. Under one of these pointed roofs
lived two young people whom the coldness of emigration had huddled
together in a closer intimacy. They were very unconscious of the
fog, and it never occurred to them that the city looked like a
forest of steeples; in fact, they never thought of the city at all,
and would scarcely have been surprised if they had heard it spoken
of as an orange grove,--for they were lovers. The little nest they
had built themselves under the pointed roof was bright with the
sunshine that came from them; and the few people who entered there
became intoxicated with a strange aroma of tenderness that surged to
their brains like the fumes of old wine, in sweet reminiscences or
disturbing suggestions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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