ce; and finally, starting up, I danced for her benefit polka,
mazurka, and valse, whistling and singing to my motions.

More than once during the evening she tried to introduce serious
subjects, telling me that I must always live with them, learn to shoot
the birds and catch the fishes, and have a wife; and then she would
speak of her granddaughter Oalava, whose virtues it was proper to
mention, but whose physical charms needed no description since they had
never been concealed. Each time she got on this topic I cut her short,
vowing that if I ever married she only should be my wife. She informed
me that she was old and past her fruitful period; that not much longer
would she make cassava bread, and blow the fire to a flame with her
wheezy old bellows, and talk the men to sleep at night. But I stuck to
it that she was young and beautiful, that our descendants would be more
numerous than the birds in the forest. I went out to some bushes close
by, where I had noticed a passion plant in bloom, and gathering a few
splendid scarlet blossoms with their stems and leaves, I brought them in
and wove them into a garland for the old dame's head; then I pulled her
up, in spite of screams and struggles, and waltzed her wildly to the
other end of the room and back again to her seat beside the fire. And
as she sat there, panting and grinning with laughter, I knelt before her
and, with suitable passionate gestures, declaimed again the old delicate
lines sung by Mena before Columbus sailed the seas:

Muy mas clara que la luna
Sola una
en el mundo vos nacistes
tan gentil, que no vecistes
ni tavistes
competedora ninguna
Desdi ninez en la cuna
cobrastes fama, beldad, con tanta graciosidad,
que vos doto la fortuna.

Thinking of another all the time! O poor old Cla-cla, knowing not what
the jingle meant nor the secret of my wild happiness, now when I recall
you sitting there, your old grey owlish head crowned with scarlet
passion flowers, flushed with firelight, against the background of
smoke-blackened walls and rafters, how the old undying sorrow comes back
to me!

Thus our evening was spent, merrily enough; then we made up the fire
with hard wood that would last all night, and went to our hammocks, but
wakeful still. The old dame, glad and proud to be on duty once more,
religiously went to work to talk me to sleep; but although I called out
at intervals to encourage her to go on, I did not atte