STARVING JOHN THE DOCTOR.
No one was ever more appropriately named than ‘Starving John.’ He had nothing to live upon, yet he had a wife and a whole tribe of children to support: how to feed them all he knew not; and as for himself it was seldom enough he got a morsel to eat!
One day the cat caught a hare, and John’s wife managed to take it from him; and having made a savoury mess of it, she put it into a wallet and said to John, “Here, take this hato[1]; it’s a lucky taste of something nice, such as you don’t often get; and go out into the fields with it before those sharks of children snatch it out of your mouth.”
John, who was ready to die of hunger, didn’t wait to be told twice, but set off running as fast as his legs would carry him. At last he came to an olive-grove; and there, making an easy-chair of a hollow olive-tree, he sat down to eat his hare, as happy as a king.
Somehow however—he could never tell how—there suddenly stood before him a dreadful old woman, all dressed in black: she had sunken eyes as dull as a blown-out candle, or a lamp-wick when the oil fails; her skin was as withered and yellow as a Simancas[2] parchment; her mouth like a clothes-basket; and her nose I don’t know how to describe—for she had no nose at all to speak of.
“A pretty figure this to fall from heaven, like God’s rain, on a poor fellow!” said John to himself; but as he was polite and hospitable, as a Spanish peasant always is, he nevertheless asked if she would share his meal.
This was just what the old creature wanted; down she sat, and at once attacked the hare. But it was not like ordinary eating, it was regular devouring; and, en un decir tilin[3], she had stowed away the whole mess between her heart and her shoulders!
John was too polite to grumble out aloud, but he said to himself, “Why, the children had better have had the hare than this old hag! but ¡el que tiene mala fortuna nada le sale derecho[4]!”
When his visitor had finished her meal—not leaving so much as the tail of the hare in the ollita[5]—she exclaimed, “Do you know, John, your hare was very good!”