I.
Pacorrito Migajas was a great character. He stood a trifle over two feet from the ground, and had just turned his seventh year. His skin was tanned by the sun and the wind, and his wizened face suggested a dwarf rather than a child. His eyes, adorned with long eyelashes that looked like black wires, were full of vitality and resplendent with mischief. His mouth was amazing in its ugliness; and his ears, strangely like those of a faun, seemed to have been attached to his face, rather than to have grown there. He was dressed in a shirt of every possible shade of grime, and a pair of patchwork trousers upheld by a single suspender. In the winter he wore a coat which he had inherited from his grandfather. The sleeves had been cut off at the elbow, and Pacorrito considered it a handsome fit, as overcoats go. A rag which aspired to be a muffler was wound like a snake round and round his neck, and on his head he wore a cap which he had picked up at the Rastro. He had little use for shoes, which he considered in the light of a hindrance, neither did he wear stockings, having a great aversion to the roughness of the threads.
Pacorrito's ancestors could not have been more illustrious. His father, accused of having attempted to make his way into a house through the drain, went to Ceuta for a change of climate, and died there. His mother, a great lady who for many years kept a chestnut-stand in the Cava de San Miguel, had also fallen somehow into the hands of the authorities, and after much ado with judges and notaries, had repaired to the Alcalá jail. Pacorrito had one sister, but this last relative had deserted her post at the tobacco factory and flown to Sevilla in amorous pursuit of an artillery officer. Up to the present she has not returned.
Migajas was therefore alone in the world, with no protection but that of God, and no guide but his own will.