After he had gone, we were still playing, when Marciana came in with some parcels.
"Aha!" she cried. "That is a jota. It is the music of mi pueblo. La jota, La jota."
She put down the parcels; spread out her arms and with a balance and elegance extraordinary in one so bulky began to dance. After twenty bars, however, she stopped.
"Ei," she sighed, "how sad it is that one grows old. How sad that youth passes all too quickly!"
That night a terrific thunderstorm broke over the valley. The thunder crashed, the lightning flared and the rain came down as though pouring from a gigantic hose. In the middle of all the noise we heard a strange sound.
The cat had come back; but with only one kitten. The next morning we stayed in the house. From the windows we could mark the change which autumn had brought over the Paseo de Corveras. The dust was no longer blown along the road, which was now a still river of liquid mud. The town dust-cart, a donkey with panniers, no longer promenaded the street; no longer did we hear the cheerful blasphemy of the dust-boy who, stooping to gather up some refuse, found that his dust-cart had impatiently trotted on. In its place were the exhortations of the pig-drivers, who urged hordes of monstrous black pigs through the mud. Some of the porkers were, however, so heavy on their feet that they had to be brought in carts. The squealing of them filled the morning air. The fruit merchants, also with panniered donkeys, no longer called out "Melacotones, peras!" but "Uvas! Uvas!"[27] and a man wandered about with a huge basket of snails. The maize fields in front of the house were cut and stacked, and in the fields queens of Sheba were dragging the primitive ploughs, while men behind them beat to powder the lumps of baked earth which were turned up. Instead of the almost dead silence which greeted the strengthening sun, people moved about all day; parasols had given place to flirting fans. The country girls wore bunches of flowers in their hair, some even put one tall blossom sticking upright from the _coiffure_, where it nodded and bowed with the movements of the wearer. In the fruit garden the lemons had quite fallen, but the oranges were beginning to become a livid yellow on one side of the bush, while the dates had passed from a pale to a deep golden hue.