“Did you know the world was round?” he asked. “And that there is a red-haired goblin who sits in the center and holds on to our feet so we shan’t tumble off? When he yawns, it gives us an earthquake. A good old fellow, that, but he has too long a name for such little pink ears as yours.” “My ears are larger,” suggested Rafael. “And Shags and Don Quixote have the largest ears of all,” added Pilarica, and then blushed to see that even her father smiled, while the Geography Gentleman gurgled and wheezed until his yellow face was streaked with purple. “Good! good! good!” he squeaked, as soon as he could muster even so much voice again. “The goblin’s name is Gravitation, and he sits all doubled up, with his long nose gripped between his knees, pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling, till his arms are almost ripped out of his shoulders, but not quite. For though he’s uglier than hunger, he’s stronger than the sun and the moon.” The child gazed doubtfully at the big globe. “Will you please open it and show him to me?” Again the Geography Gentleman fell to laughing until he had to hold his aching sides. “But do you think I have wind-mills in my head that I talk such a monstrous heap of nonsense?” he asked. “It is only that pretty little ladies like nonsense better than sense. No, I cannot open my globe for you, dainty one, but see! I can show you Spain.” But Pilarica’s faith in the Geography Gentleman was shaken. “Spain is not blue,” she objected, looking critically at the color of the patch beneath his thumb. And even while he pointed out Andalusia in the south, with its Moorish cities of Granada and Seville and Cordova, and the port of Cadiz; and Castile, occupying the middle of the Peninsula, with its ancient city of Toledo and its royal city of Madrid; and her father’s native province of Aragon to the northeast, with Saragossa, the home of his boyhood, still Pilarica’s air was so skeptical as to throw the lecturer into frequent convulsions of mirth. “But where is the basket,--the big basket that Spain flings acorns into?” she questioned. This, again, was too much for the Geography Gentleman, and while he was gasping and choking, Don Carlos came to his little daughter’s aid. “Cuba is an island,” he explained, “the largest of the West Indian islands and almost all that is left to Spain of her once vast American possessions. One by one, the lands she had discovered and claimed--you remember about Queen Isabella and Columbus--rebelled against her, or otherwise slipped from her hold, and even now there is a revolt in Cuba that has already cost Spain dear in life and treasure.” “And if the Yankees take a hand in the game,” put in their host, “may cost us Cuba herself.” “What are Yankees?” asked Rafael, frowning quite terribly at this suggestion. “The most powerful nation in America,” replied Don Carlos, “a nation that threatens to go to war with us, if the trouble in Cuba continues much longer.”