“ ‘In my new spring suit (aha the spring!)
I’m a prettier fellow
Than his Majesty there (oho the king!)
For all his purple and yellow.’
The king, very angry, had the bird caught and broiled and, to make sure of him, ate him himself, but the little rebel raised such a riot in the royal stomach that the king was glad enough to throw him up again. The bird came out in forlorn plight, stripped of all his new feathers, but he went hopping about the garden, begging a plume from every bird he met, so that he was soon even gayer and saucier than before. But when the king tried to catch him again, he flew so fast he drank the winds and did not stop till he was above the nose of the moon.”
“Bah!” said Tia Marta. “Stuff and nonsense”
“Rubbish!” chimed in Bastiano. “Pedrillo must have been taught to lie by a serpent descended from the snake of Eden.”
“And what, pray, do you know about it?” snapped Tia Marta, turning most inconsistently against her fellow-critic, “you who are standing off there solitary as asparagus or as that ill-tempered old rat who made himself a hermitage in a cheese,—You who couldn’t tell a story half as good, no, not for a pancake full of gold-pieces!”
“What a scolding deluge is this! It froths and fizzes like cider. It’s a pity there are not stoppers enough for all the bottles in the world,” retorted Bastiano.
“Come, come!” interposed Grandfather. “Stabs heal, but sharp words never. There is a cool breeze springing up. Thank God for his angel, the wind!
“ ‘Without wings to church it flies,
Without a mouth it whistles,
And without hands it turns the leaves
Of the Gospels and Epistles.’ ”
The little fire on the rock flared up in the gust, and the children, who, having borrowed all the hats in the company, had ranged them in a row and were trying to outdo each other in jumping over every hat in the line and back again without a pause, came panting up to watch the flame.
“Sing us the fire songs, please, Grandfather,” coaxed Pilarica. She brought the old man his guitar and as the withered fingers moved over the strings, even Don Manuel drew near to listen.