women in Goya’s pictures, and somewhat of the fashion worn by Queen Maria Louisa:  if not exactly so scant, yet so short that it showed her small feet, and the commencement of her superb limbs; her bodice was low, and round in the neck, according to the style in Madrid, where she spent two months with her Luke on their way from Navarre to Andalusia.  She dressed her hair high on the top of her head, displaying thus both the graceful curve of her snowy neck and the shape of her pretty head.  She wore earrings in her small ears, and the taper fingers of her rough but clean hands were covered with rings.  Lastly, Frasquita’s voice was as sweet as a flute, and her laugh was so merry and so silvery it seemed like the ringing of bells on Saturday of Glory or Easter Eve.

HOW THE ORPHAN MANUEL GAINED HIS SOBRIQUET

From ‘The Child of the Ball’

The unfortunate boy seemed to have turned to ice from the cruel and unexpected blows of fate; he contracted a death-like pallor, which he never again lost.  No one paid any attention to the unhappy child in the first moments of his anguish, or noticed that he neither groaned, sighed, nor wept.  When at last they went to him they found him convulsed and rigid, like a petrifaction of grief; although he walked about, heard and saw, and covered his wounded and dying father with kisses.  But he shed not a single tear, either during the death agony of that beloved being, when he kissed the cold face after it was dead, or when he saw them carry the body away forever; nor when he left the house in which he had been born, and found himself sheltered by charity in the house of a stranger.  Some praised his courage, others criticized his callousness.  Mothers pitied him profoundly, instinctively divining the cruel tragedy that was being enacted in the orphan’s heart for want of some tender and compassionate being to make him weep by weeping with him.

Nor did Manuel utter a single word from the moment he saw his beloved father brought in dying.  He made no answer to the affectionate questions asked him by Don Trinidad after the latter had taken him home; and the sound of his voice was never heard during the first three years which he spent in the holy company of the priest.  Everybody thought by this time that he would remain dumb forever, when one day, in the church of which his protector was the priest, the sacristan observed him standing before a beautiful image of the “Child of the Ball,” and heard him saying in melancholy accents:—­

“Child Jesus, why do you not speak either?”

Manuel was saved.  The drowning boy had raised his head above the engulfing waters of his grief.  His life was no longer in danger.  So at least it was believed in the parish.

Toward strangers—­from whom, whenever they came in contact with him, he always received demonstrations of pity and kindness—­the orphan continued to maintain the same glacial reserve as before, rebuffing them with the phrase, stereotyped on his disdainful lips, “Let me alone, now;” having said which, in tones of moving entreaty, he would go on his way, not without awakening superstitious feelings in the minds of the persons whom he thus shunned.