'I have a book in Latin.'
'In taffeta we'll dress you.'
'My clothes are all of satin.'
'You shall ride upon a donkey.'
'I ride in coaches here.'
'We'll give you golden ear-rings.'
'Farewell, my mother dear.'"
In some of the many variants of this game, the Queen herself, adequate as she may be to earning her own living, is wooed and won at last.
I have not met with fairy-lore among these children's carols. The only fairy known to Spain appears to be a sort of spiritualistic brownie, who tips over tables and rattles chairs in empty rooms by night. The grown-up men who write of him say he frightens women and children. He can haunt a house as effectually as an old-time ghost, and a Casa del Duende may go begging for other tenants. One poor lady, who went to all the trouble of moving to escape from him, was leaning over the balcony of her new home,—so the story goes,—to see the last cartful of furniture drive up, when a tiny man in scarlet waved a feathered cap to her from the very top of the load and called, "Yes, señora, we are all here. We have moved."
So the childish imagination of Spain, shut out from fairyland, makes friends with the saints in such innocent, familiar way as well might please even Ribera's anchorites. The adventurous small boy about to take a high jump pauses to pray:—