Francisco might have gone inside, where the darkened rooms furnished some relief, but he chose to sit crosslegged on the red and white square stones of the _patio_, with his back to the main part of the house, so that the mother and sisters could not see what occupied his busy hands.
Francisco's father was dead, and he, with his mother, La Señora Anita Maria Lacevera de Gonzalez, and his two sisters, Elena Maria, who was six, and Guillerma Maria, who was eighteen and very beautiful, lived in the Calle[1] Cerrito, in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentine Republic, South America.
Francisco, himself, was nine, and his uncle who was a colonel in the army and who supported his widowed sister and her family, expected him to be a soldier also. His great-grandfather had been a general, and because of his services during the revolution that had brought Argentina her liberty nearly one hundred years ago, his family was one of the most distinguished in the Republic. Francisco's own grandfather had given his life for his _patria_ during the ten years' blockade of Buenos Aires, when the French and English forces combined to overcome General Rosas, who then commanded the city. His mother and his uncle, the Colonel Juan Carlos Lacevera, were then little children, but they were fired with a patriotism that comes only to those who have given of their own flesh and blood for native land.
"El Coronel Lacevera" was now retired, and with his wife and six daughters lived in a spacious, palatial home in the Calle San Martin facing the beautiful plaza, or park, where the statue of General San Martin on his rearing charger stands, a constant reminder to the hundreds of little Argentine boys and girls who daily play in the pebbled space around it, of the wonderful man, who, like George Washington, was first in war, first in peace, and is still first in the hearts of his countrymen.
The monthly allowance bestowed by Colonel Lacevera upon his sister was enough to keep them in comfort, but not sufficient to allow them to live in luxury, and to-day, because Francisco had not enough money to buy his Christmas _pesebre_ at the toyshop, he was doing what many little boys of that country do,--he was making his own.