Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

CHORAL GAMES OF SPANISH CHILDREN

"Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,

She turns to favor and to prettiness."

—Shakespeare: Hamlet.

On one of my last afternoons in Madrid, I visited again my early haunts in the Buen Retiro, for a farewell sight of the children there at play. After all, it is one of the prettiest things to be seen in Spain, these graceful, passionate, dramatic little creatures dancing in tireless circles, and piping those songs that every niña knows, without being able to tell when or where or from whom she learned them. Only very small boys, as a rule, join the girls in these fairy rings, though occasionally I found a troop of urchins marching to a lusty chorus of their own. One, which I heard in Madrid, but whose parrots are more suggestive of Seville, runs something like this:—

"In the street they call Toledo

Is a famous school for boys,

Chundarata, chundarata,

Chundarata, chún-chún;