Nancy first and last

by Amy Ella Blanchard

"Oh, you dear Englishy mother," cried Anita. "Well, as I am half English I will follow the custom half the time." She settled her hat upon her curly head saying: "There, I look like any American girl, for I have completely un-Spanished myself, and with my stately mother will be recognized anywhere as an Inglesa. What do we do when we get to the town?"

"We shall be met by your father's cousin, Doña Benilda. She is to guide us to the village."

"As she is my cousin, too, I hope I shall like her," remarked Anita as they started forth.

The tinkle of a bell, the call of "Señores viajeres para Santander al tren" and the train, upon which Anita and her mother had been travelling, glided off, leaving them upon the platform looking curiously around. How, among the many black clad women, were they to distinguish Doña Benilda? Peasant women with little shawls across their shoulders or folded over their heads trudged off with baskets; girls, daintily shod, with hair carefully arranged, chattered in groups, workmen in blue jeans moved with deliberation about the platform. Presently a middle-aged, dark-eyed little woman, enveloped from head to foot in a black veil, and followed by a little maid, came up to the strangers. "Doña Catalina and Señorita Anita, my cousins, without doubt," she said in Spanish.

"And our cousin Doña Benilda," replied Mrs. Beltrán in the same tongue. "But how did you know us so readily?"

"Oh, the hats, the hats," returned Doña Benilda, smiling. Then she kissed them on each cheek, summoned the little maid to carry their bags and they started up the street of the quaint and pretty town, mountains on one side, the great Cantabric Sea on the other. Now that the tide was coming in it rose in certain streets, lapping against the sides of ancient houses whose small slits of windows had looked out for centuries upon the incoming or outgoing flood. The little market place was lively with shoppers, while from the grim, gray old church issued a throng of black-robed women, mantillas on heads and missals in hands.

Before the door of one of the fairly modern apartment houses the party paused to mount many stairs and at last to find themselves in Doña Benilda's high-up rooms where the guests were welcomed with much ceremony; the house was theirs, they were told. From the balcony swung vines and gay flowering plants; a bird chirped in a gilded cage by a curtained window; there were many rooms, many mirrors, few pictures, a large and ornate representation of the Virgin of Covadonga the most prized. The sala, arranged after the regulation style of that part of the country, showed a bent-wood sofa with three chairs ranged at each end in regular order and facing one another. One or two old cabinets, an antique chest, a high antique refectory table, finely carved, completed the furniture. From the windows of one of the rooms one beheld the range of mountains fading off into the clouds; on the other side sparkled the sea. The long sea wall, time-worn, small-eaved stone houses, a distant church perched upon a hill, peeped out from the green of trees, and farther off the white houses of a village showed themselves enclosed in thick embowerage.

Anita had a strange feeling of association with it all. The home of her ancestors it was which Doña Benilda pointed out to her, the church where her father was baptized and the distant village where he was born. "Cuesta is the name," Doña Benilda told her. "We go there to-morrow."

Though understanding something of the talk Anita was obliged to turn frequently to her mother to interpret.

"My daughter has not yet become very proficient in her father's language," Mrs. Beltrán explained. "She can speak a little, read more, but it is another thing to understand what is said to her."