"Well, do you want to or not? Hurry up and decide."
Manuel lazily arose. The rag man, sack slung across his shoulder, climbed the slope of the embankment until he reached Rosales Street, where he had a cart drawn by two donkeys. The man told them to move on and they ambled down toward the Paseo de la Florida, thence through Virgen del Puerto Avenue to the Ronda de Segovia. The cart, with its license plate and number, was a tumbledown affair, held together by strips of brass, and was laden with two or three sacks, buckets and baskets.
The ragman, Señor Custodio,—that was what he gave as his name,—looked like a good-natured soul.
From time to time he would bend over, pick up something from the street and throw it into the cart.
Underneath the cart, attached to it by a chain, jogged along in leisurely fashion a dog with yellowish locks, long and lustrous,—an amiable creature who appeared to Manuel as good a canine as his master was a human being.
* * * * *
Between the Segovia and Toledo bridges, not far from the head of Imperial Avenue, there opens a dark depression with a cluster of two or three squalid, wretched huts. It is a quadrangular ditch, blackened by smoke and coal dust, hemmed in by crumbling walls and heaps of rubbish.
As he reached the edge of this depression, the rag-dealer stopped and pointed out to Manuel a hovel standing next to a broken-down merry-go-round and some swings, saying:
"That's my house; take the cart down there and unload it. Can you do that?"
"Yes, I think so."