In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and RafaelBates, Katharine Lee
General
In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael
Bates, Katharine Lee
Children -- Spain -- Juvenile literature
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.
“Have you saws that saw as sharp saws should?”
“Yes, my saws are very good.”
“Have you planes that plane as smooth planes should?”
“Yes, my planes are very good.”
“Have you hammers that pound as hammers should?”
“Yes, my hammers are very good.”
“Have you gimlets that bore as gimlets should?”
“No, my gimlets are not so good.”
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:
“He needs a gimlet; that is true.
He needs a gimlet and he’ll take you.”
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!
“O the Moon and the Morning-stars!
O the Moon and the Morning-stars!
Who dares to tread--O
Within the shadow?”
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:
“Ho! Old Uncle! Seller of Greens!
We are robbing you of your beans.”
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:
“Rat, rat! Can’t you find the rat?
Look in this hole and look in that.”
“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?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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