Our guide assumed the virtue of the greatest indignation,
though he ought to have known that we could not get in on that saint's
day; but it did not avail, and the little group dispersed, led off by
the brown peasant who was willing to share my pleasure in our excursion
as a good joke on us, and smiled with a show of teeth as white as the
eggs in his basket. After all, it was not wholly a hardship; we could
walk about in the sunny if somewhat muddy open, and warm ourselves
against the icily shaded drive back to town; besides, there was a little
girl crouching at the foot of a tree, and playing at a phase of the
housekeeping which is the game of little girls the world over. Her sad,
still-faced mother standing near, with an interest in her apparently
renewed by my own, said that she was four years old, and joined me in
watching her as she built a pile of little sticks and boiled an
imaginary little kettle over them. I was so glad even of a make-believe
fire that I dropped a copper coin beside it, and the mother smiled
pensively as if grateful but not very hopeful from this beneficence,
though after reflection I had made my gift a "big dog" instead of a
"small dog," as the Spanish call a ten and a five centimo piece.
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