“Que te hace trabajar?” cried the mountebank, the clown’s strident voice is the same the world over, “Que te hace trabajar?” (What makes you work?)
“El hambre!” (hunger), answered the pinched child.
“Tiene razon!” (he is right), laughed Miquel, the farmer. The crowd applauded; a few coppers rattled in the girl’s tambourine.
We came upon Patsy, lost since morning, outside a booth of primitive farming tools. The sickles, the rakes, the spades, shaped properly like spades in a pack of cards, even the hoes, had a certain rustic beauty that woke the Adam in every boy that passed, and made his fingers itch to handle them. Patsy balanced a mighty scythe knowingly, as one who has known the trick of mowing.
“That is just what I want for my picture of ‘Time and the Woman,’” said J.; he looked with longing at the scythe.
“Of course, it is the very thing,” said Patsy; “it has a lot of character. It doesn’t look as if it had been turned out by a machine with a thousand others. Listen to this bell!” He tinkled the clapper of a beaten-copper sheep bell. “What a silver note! One wouldn’t mind being wakened by this, when the cows go to pasture at daylight!”
“These juggets,” Pemberton led the way to a booth where coarse glazed pottery was displayed, “are nice in color, aren’t they?”
“The green and yellow bowls are just the thing to put about the Cornish place for the birds to drink and take their baths from,” said Patsy. “Let us have a lot sent home with the scythe and the bell. How you feel the Moorish influence in the design,—you can’t get away from that, can you? You might as well try to subtract the Norman from the English, as to subtract the Moor from the Spaniard; you come across him every moment, in the manners, in the language—all the words beginning with al are Moorish; in the dress,—the mantilla is the survival of the yashmak; in the sense of color and design, that flat, blue dish is a thing of beauty and absolutely Moorish in spirit.”
“I can’t enthuse about it any more than I could about the Alhambra, the Alcazar, or anything else that recalls the presence of those brutes in Spain,” interrupted a small, keen-eyed man who had been listening to the talk.
Patsy was the first to recover his speech.