And then the game began all over again with another youngster secretly appointed by the master as “tinker and tongs.”
Pilarica frankly disdained the Galician games. It hurt the child’s sense of romance and poetry to find the same plays that had been robed in beautiful suggestion, as she romped through them with her Andalusian mates, given this queer, workaday, bread-and-butter flavor. How lovely it used to be when the children would choose Pilarica to lead the Morning-stars in their dancing advances nearer and nearer the deep shadow cast by the Alhambra wall! Within the mystery of dusk would lurk the lonely Moon, waiting her chance to spring and catch the first daring star who should venture to skip across the line dividing light from darkness! How the very words of the song twinkled and tempted!
“O the Moon and the Morning-stars!
O the Moon and the Morning-stars!
Who dares to tread—O
Within the shadow?”
And here was the same play in Galicia so degraded that Pilarica would never consent to play it. Instead of the Moon in the shadow, a beanseller sat in his stall, and instead of stars there were thieves who scampered over the forbidden border, shouting rudely:
“Ho! Old Uncle! Seller of Greens!
We are robbing you of your beans.”
On a certain sunshiny morning of her second autumn in Galicia, Pilarica was protesting to her schoolmates against the game of Hunt the Rat. For Pilarica went to school. The little girl had teased so to be taught that Uncle Manuel, to quiet her, was sending her, at a penny a week, to the dame-school kept in the porch of an old gray church. It was against the church wall that the children were seated in a close row, so that the rat, Pilarica’s shoe, could be hidden between the wall and the small of their backs. As the shoe was shuffled along from one to another, the seeker was teased with the song:
“Rat, rat! Can’t you find the rat?
Look in this hole and look in that.”
“It’s ugly,” pouted Pilarica. “I don’t want my shoe to be a rat. Why don’t you hunt a golden cup or a fairy or something else that is nice to think about?”
The other children stared and one tall, sullen-faced girl rudely threw the shoe back to Pilarica.
“Because we don’t have golden cups and fairies in Galicia to hunt,” she said, “and we do have rats. That’s sense, isn’t it? But take your old shoe. We don’t want it.”