"Your little honey-jars are good?"
"Very good."
"Do they weigh much?"
"Let's see."
So they pick up an hilarious little honey-jar by its handles and tug it away between them, not letting it touch the ground, to the sidewalk. Here the merchant and customer have designated four spaces as Heaven, Limbo, Purgatory, and Hell, but on a preliminary paving-stone—let truth need no apology!—they have done some artistic spitting, with the result that four different figures in saliva are presented to the little honey-jar. These four figures bear a secret relation to the four spaces on the sidewalk, and the prisoner must make his choice. "This!" he ventures. "Hell!" scream the merchant and customer, and drag him, shrieking and struggling, to his doom. The next, perhaps, will have the luck to hit on Heaven, for every little honey-jar must take his chance in this theological lottery.
Sometimes the market becomes a transformation scene. The children hold up their forefingers for candles, but embarrass the merchant by doubling these up whenever the customer is on the point of buying. Just as the bargain is about to be concluded, the little candles vanish and the children roll themselves into bunches of grapes, some proving sweet and others sour. Again, they make themselves over into pitchers, cushions, and all variety of domestic articles, becoming at last a pack of barking dogs which rush out on the customer, snap at his legs, and drive him off the premises.
Again, it is a chicken-market on which the Uncle of the Torn Trousers chances, where one by one he buys all the hens and chickens, but forgets to buy the rooster, and when, by and by, this lordly fowl, waxing lonely, cock-a-doodle-doos, the hens and chickens come scurrying back to him, more to the profit of the merchant than to the satisfaction of the customer.
In another of the chicken games, the Mother leaves Mariquilla in charge of the brood, with directions, if the wolf comes, to fling him the smallest. But he comes so often that, when the Mother returns, there are no chickens left. Then she and Little Mary go hunting them, hop-hop-hop through Flea Street, bow-wow-wow through Dog Street, and so on without success, until it occurs to them to scatter corn. Thereupon with peep-peep-peep and flip-flap-flutter all the chickens appear, but only to fly at the negligent Mother, who left them to the jaws of the wolf, and assail her with such furious pecks that she must run for her life, the indignant chicks racing in wild pursuit.
There is a market-garden game, where one acts as gardener, others as vegetables, and others as customers. Others, still, come creeping up as thieves, but are opposed by a barking dog, which they kill. The gardener summons them before the judge. A trial is held, with much fluent Spanish argument pro and con, and the prisoners are condemned to execution for the murder of the dog. But at the last thrilling moment, when they have confessed their sins to the priests, and been torn from the embraces of their weeping friends, the dog trots cheerfully in, so very much alive that all the criminals are pardoned in a general dance of joy.
The little girls have a favorite shopping game. In this the children are seated, shoulder to shoulder, in two rows that face each other. Every child takes the name of some cloth, silks and satins being preferred. The leader of the game runs around the two rows, singing:—