“_Do_n’t pin-prick my darling dolly, _Do_ _Re_spect my domestic matters. _Re_ _Me_thinks she grows melancholy, _Mi_ _Fa_st as her sawdust scatters. _Fa_ _Sol_e rose of your mamma’s posy. _Sol_ _La_ugh at your mamma, so! _La_ _Se_al up your eyes all cozy. _Si_ _La Sol Fa Mi Re Do._”
After Pilarica and the doll had done their best for half an hour to inculcate a knowledge of the scales, the dame bade the children go and play _Kite_ in the churchyard; but one of them remained.
“Well?” asked the old woman apprehensively.
“Will you please teach me something?” pleaded Pilarica.
“Ay, child, to be sure I will,” and the wrinkled hand drew, from a crack in a wondrously carven pedestal beside her, all the library the school possessed,--a dilapidated primer and a few loose leaves from a prayer-book.
The mistress pored over these dubiously for a while and then her look brightened.
“This is _O_,” she said impressively, “and that is _M_.”
“But you teach me O and M every time,” remonstrated Pilarica, “and never anything else. Indeed, I know O and M quite well now.”
The old dame cocked her red horns petulantly and thrust back her library into the marble crevice.
“O and M are very good learning,” she insisted. “Go back under the doorway and say your prayer and don’t come to school again to-day.”
So Pilarica, the corners of her mouth drooping just a little, knelt under the Gothic portal and repeated:
“Mother Most Holy, Thy servant kneels to say That with thy kind permission It is time to play. Mother Most Holy, My loving heart implores, Bless this little sinner Before she runs outdoors.”
Pilarica was quite at home, by this time, in the crooked, sombre streets of Santiago, whose stones are histories. There fell on her unconscious little figure, as she tripped along, the shadow of ancient buildings,--churches, convents, hospitals, with quaintly sculptured fronts. Over many of the massive, deeply recessed doors was graven the cockle shell of St. James, showing that these were once rest houses for the overflow of pilgrims, of whom thousands used to sleep on the floor of the cathedral. Over the rough granite slabs that paved the roads her little feet danced on to an inner music of her own, though all about her was the harsh uproar of a Spanish city,--children blowing penny whistles, blacksmiths beating their anvils, shopmen calling their wares. The screech of the file, the grating of the saw, the click of the chisel, added their discords to the braying of donkeys, the cracking of whips, the screaming of parrots, the clanging of mule-bells.