In a mud-walled hut perched over the brink of the ravine and sheltered there by a shelving rock, an old Gallegan peasant sat huddled over a fire and face to face with starvation. The fire, banked in the centre of the earthen floor, filled all the cabin with smoke, which escaped only by a gap in the thatch and a window-hole overlooking the ravine. An iron crock, on a chain furred with soot, hung from the rafters, where sooty cobwebs, a foot and more in length, waved noiselessly in the draught. It was empty, but he had no strength to lift it off its hook; and at the risk of cracking it he had piled up the logs on the hearth, for the cold searched his old bones. The window-hole showed a patch of fading day, wintry and sullen: but no beam of it penetrated within, where the firelight flickered murkily on three beds of dirty straw, a table like a butcher's block, and, at the back of the hut, an alcove occupied by three sooty dolls beneath a crucifix--the Virgin, St. Joseph, and St. James. The alcove was just a recess scooped out of the _adobe_ wall: and the old man himself could not have told why his house had been built of unbaked mud when so much loose stone lay strewn about the mountain-side ready to hand. Possibly even his ancestors, who had built it, could not have told. They had come from the plain-land near Zamora, and built in the only fashion they knew--a fashion which _their_ ancestors had learnt from the Moors: but time and the mountain's bad habit of dropping stones had taught them to add a stout roof. For generations they had clung to this perch, and held body and soul together by the swine-herding. They pastured their pigs three miles below, where the ravine opened upon a valley moderately fertile and wooded with oak and chestnut; and in midwinter drove them back to the hill and styed them in a large pen beside the hut, in which, if the pen were crowded, they made room for the residue. The family now consisted of the old man, Gil Chaleco (a widower and past work); his son Gil the Younger, with a wife, Juana; their only daughter, Mercedes, her young husband, Sebastian May, and their two-year-old boy. The two women worked with the men in herding the swine and were given sole charge of them annually, when Gil the Younger and Sebastian tramped it down to the plains and hired themselves out for the harvest.