of the head, and gestures, and every time
that the mayor bid higher and Maria feigned to be reluctant, she
almost hoped that the mayor would withdraw from his proposition, for
the great grief it caused her to despoil herself of that precious
ornament, notwithstanding that my means of it she might gain her
father's health. Finally the mayor, anxious to conclude the treaty,
for he saw the stirring of the curtains, and knew by them the anxiety
and state of mind of the listener, closed by saying:

"Go to, hussy, I will give thee five hundred _maravedis_. See, once
and for all, if thou canst agree on these terms."

"Be it so," replied Maria, sighing as if her soul would flee from her
flesh with these words--"be it so, so long that nobody doth know that
I remain bald."

"I will give my word for it," said the mayoress, stepping from behind
the curtains with a pair of sharp shears in her hands and a wrapper
over her arm.

When Maria saw the scissors she turned as yellow as wax, and when they
told her to sit down on the sacrificial chair, she felt herself grow
faint and had to ask for a drink of water; and when they tied the
wrapper round her throat it is related that she would have immediately
torn it asunder if her courage had not failed her. And when at the
first movement of the shears she felt the cold iron against her skull,
I tell you it seemed to her as if they were piercing her heart with a
bright dagger. It is possible that she did not keep her head still for
a moment while this tonsuring was taking place; she moved it in spite
of herself, now to one side, now to another, to flee from the clipping
scissors, of which the rude cuts and the creaking axis wounded her
ears. Her posture and movements, however, were of no avail to the poor
shorn maiden, and the pertinacious shearer, with the anxiety and
covetousness of a pregnant woman satisfying a caprice, seized the hair
well, or ill, by handfuls, and went on bravely clipping, and the locks
fell on to the white wrapper, slipping down thence till they reached
the ground.

At last the business came to an end, and the mayoress, who was beside
herself with joy, caressingly passed the palm of her hand again and
again over the maid's bald head from the front to the back, saying:

"By my mother's soul, I have shorn you so regularly and close to the
root that the most skilful barber could not have shorn you better.
Get up and braid the hair while my husband goes to get the mo