The road was a beautiful one. Once beyond the outskirts of the town it passed between slopes luxuriant in almonds and olives. Here and there the falling golden leaves of a pomegranate made an aureate glow on the red-brown earth. Perched high in an olive-tree by the wayside a man was pruning its branches.
For the first ten minutes Antonia was demurely silent. Then, as her shyness wore off, her horns appeared. She was a charming imp of seven, the adored of her parents, who knew her variously as Anton, Antonia, and Antonetta. Anton, in a tone of reproof when she was caught pulling the hair of a friend, Antonia when she was ordinarily good, and Antonetta on the many occasions that they found her particularly adorable.
She went, apparently only when she had got nothing more interesting to do, to a convent school, where she was, with exceeding reluctance, beginning to learn Spanish—a tongue against which she naturally cherished a grievance.
"What is the use of learning Spanish?" she demanded of the Boy, who was urging her to speak it. "Majorcan—that is a useful language. Spanish? No. Spanish is no use."
By the wayside the curious wild arums known as frares (monks) were growing. Picking a handful, Antonia began with great enjoyment repeating a native rhyme, the point of which lay in knocking off the heads of one of the flowers at the conclusion of each repetition:—
"Frare lleig, frare lleig,
Si no dius se Misa, le tomeré es bech!"
—of which this is an easy translation:—
"Lazy friar, lazy friar,
If your Mass is not said I will chop off your head."
Antonia had a knowledge of vegetables too. Or is it some inherent faculty that teaches children the edible fruits? When we chanced to pass a big algarroba-tree she darted under it, and, after a little rummaging amid the dry leaves, returned triumphantly bearing some long dark-brown pods, in which the Man was amused to recognise a fruit known to his experimentive boyhood as "locusts." The pods, which are sweet and succulent, are used in Majorca as food for cattle.