“Without an s I would weep, Instead of making the hall Ready for guests who’ll keep Holiday one and all, Feasting on frosted cake Full of citron and plums, While after they’re gone I take Only a supper of crumbs.” Meanwhile Pedrillo had come to grief. Setting his foot against the flank of the mule he was loading, he pulled so vigorously on the cords that cinched the pack as to burst two buttons off his trousers. As this garment boasted only four, the dilemma was serious. The dumpy little fellow held up those two iron buttons to Tia Marta with a comical look, croaking: “They are round as moons And wear pantaloons.” “But I’ve lost my scissors,” wailed the old woman. “They slipped out of my hand just now when I was gathering up--_ay de mi!_--the last things from the chest, and that room in there is darker than Jonah’s chamber in the whale.” “Hunt up a candle and look for them, can’t you?” begged Pedrillo of the children. It was Pilarica who found, under the bench, a stray inch of tallow-dip, but it was Rafael who carried it through the house, holding it close to the floor, while Grandfather quavered: “In a little corner Sits a little old man; He wears his shirt inside his flesh; That’s a queer plan; And eats his shirt and eats his flesh Fast as he can.” When the scissors turned up, Pedrillo hailed them with a joyous couplet: “Two friends out walking quite of a mind, Their feet before and their eyes behind.” The buttons were sewed on with Tia Marta’s stoutest thread, and so, with song and jest, with bustle and stir and the excitement of trifling mischances, the great departure was made. On each mule, already hung with saddle-bags, Pedrillo had fitted a round stuffed frame, covering the entire back. Over this he had spread a rainbow-hued cloth and roped on baggage until the mules, in protest, swelled out their sides so that the cords could not stretch over anything more. Then Pedrillo, after vainly remonstrating with each animal in turn, had strapped another gay _manta_ over the whole. On Peregrina, whose harness boasted a double quantity of red tassels and strings of little bells, he had piled up the baggage so cunningly as to afford a support for Tia Marta’s back, but the Daughter of the Giralda, though undaunted by the loftiness of her proposed throne, had made her own choice among the mules. “This is mine,” she declared perversely, laying her hand on Capitana, a meek-mannered beast that stood dolefully on three legs, her ears drooping, her eyes half-closed, and her head laid pensively upon the rump of the soot-colored Carbonera. Pedrillo hesitated a moment, then grinned and helped Tia Marta scramble up to her chosen perch, where she crooked her right knee about a projection of the frame in front with an air that said she had been on mule-back many a time before.