An Inimitable Imitator
Sometimes, after “lights out,” a warning siren would be blown in camp, which, to the initiated, simply made warning that Captain Teixeira, our inimitable imitator, had been induced good-naturedly to give a performance. Then might be heard the Captain sawing his way to freedom, to the bringing in of the disconcerted guard. Followed imitation of all the fowls in the farmyard, and all the feathers in the forest, or, most humorous of all, “an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.” Perhaps I would suggest twins, whereat the Captain, who is a family man, would revert to poultry, and give an imitation of an exultant hen, whose cackling we found none the less realistic in that we have a tin of “eggs and bacon” under way for to-morrow’s breakfast.
CAPTAIN TEIXEIRA.
Captain Teixeira could not only imitate the song of birds. He was a singer himself. Among many other manifestations of friendship, he gave me a set of improvisations, “Songs from Coimbra”—Coimbra, a University town and capital of the Portuguese province of Beira, giving its name to that school of poetry which had inception in 1848 with the publication of “O Trovador.” I have made effort to convert these “Cantares” into English verse:
I
Let my coffin be
Of shape strange and bizarre—
The shape of a heart,
The shape of a guitar!
II
If a man should be slain,
And a cross mark his rest,
He shall also have grave,
Little brown girl, in your breast!
III
There are caverns in my breast
As in the bottoms of the sea
Fashioned by tides of tears,
And sorrows surging in me.
IV
Some day when I die
O love, warm and rare,
In a shroud let me lie
Of your shadowy hair.