“No, no, my son. Always the ladies first,” corrected Don Carlos, drawing Pilarica to his side. “Then it is Tia Marta who begins, for she is bigger than I am, and so she must be more of a lady,” observed Pilarica wisely. Just then the five-minute evening peal from the old Watch-Tower rang out, and Grandfather, turning to Tia Marta, recited: “Shut in a tower, I tell you truth, Is a saintly woman with only one tooth; But whenever she calls, this good old soul, Sandals patter and carriages roll.” “Bah!” ejaculated Tia Marta. “As if I had not known that ever since I could suck sugarcane! To ask a church-bell riddle of one who was born on the top of the Giralda!” “I was born in a bell-tower; So my mother tells; When the sponsors came to my christening, I was ringing the bells,” sang Grandfather roguishly, strumming on his guitar. “But this fiddling old grasshopper is enough to set the blood of St. Patience on fire,” snapped Tia Marta, who had been standing in the doorway and now indignantly popped back into her kitchen. “_Did_ Tia Marta ring the bells when she was a teenty tinty baby?” asked Pilarica. “Not just that,” replied Don Carlos, who was seated in the hammock that he had swung beside Rafael’s cot in order to care for the sick boy at night, “but it is true that she was born high up in the Giralda, which, as she may have told you, is the beautiful old Moorish minaret, that looks as if it were wrought of rose-colored lace, close by the glorious cathedral of Seville. There are thirty bells in this tower and they all have names. One is Saint Mary, I remember, and one Saint Peter, and one The Fat Lady, and one The Sweet Singer. Tia Marta can tell you all the rest, for she spent the first seventeen years of her life among them, way up above the roofs of the city. The hawks that build their nests even higher, under the gilded wings of the crowning statue of Faith, used to drop their black feathers at her feet and she would wear them in her hair when she came down to the festivals of Seville. She was a wonderful dancer in those days, I have heard your grandfather say.” “Ay, that she was,” chimed in the old man, speaking with unwonted animation. “I can see her now in her yellow skirt spangled all over with furbelows, wearing her wreath of red poppies with the best, while her little feet would twinkle to the clicking of the castanets.” “But how did she happen to grow so old and ugly?” asked Rafael. “Oh, Rafael!” exclaimed Pilarica, shocked by such unmannerly frankness. “Very nobly,” answered Don Carlos, stroking his little daughter’s hair. “By love and by service. When her father, the bell-ringer, died, and a stranger took his rooms in the Giralda, Marta came down into the city and entered the home of your grandfather and sainted grandmother--” “May God rejoice her soul with the light of Paradise!” murmured Grandfather devoutly.