fering had wrung my heart. They soon learned to divine my
sympathetic interest in them, and occasionally some of them would stop
before my window, and exchange with me amusing remarks. They
were very bright, and laughed incredulously, exchanging winks and
nods with each other, when I tried to make them believe that I was
a Mexican. I asked if they could not see from my dark hair and
eyes that I was one ; but they refused to be convinced, saying: "You
may look like a Mexican, but you can't talk like one." In the course
of time, all shyness vanished, and often, when in other parts of the
house, the young voices gleefully calling "Señorita! Señorita!" would
bring me to the drawing-room, and there would be my barred windows,
full of little dark mischievous faces, their brown hands stretched
out to me through the iron bars, through which their dancing eyes
peeped. When my housekeeping was in better running order — comparatively
speaking, of course — I sometimes gave them trifling dainties.
Cakes they accepted gladly, but when in my patriotic zeal I tried to
familiarize them with that bulwark of our Southern civilization — the
soda biscuit — they rejected it uncompromisingly, spitting and sputtering
after a taste of it, and saying: "No nos gusta" ("We don't like it"), "Good for Americans — no good for Mexicans."
A pretty child in a nurse's arms stopped before the window, and laid her tiny brown hand on me caressingly. Nurse told her to sing a pretty song for the señora, when she began :
No me mates! no me mates! no me mates!
Con pistola ni puñal;
Matame con un besito
De tus labios de coral.
Don't kill me! don't kill me! don't kill me!
With a pistol nor a dagger;
But kill me with a little kiss
Of your pretty coral lips.
I asked her to come again, and as they moved along the pretty creature waved her hand at me, saying: “Mañana! en la mañanita" ("Tomorrow morning very early "), which aroused my fears, justly enough,
