and it was so funny!
I loved Dirk very much, he was so good to me; he gave me a tame
kangaroo, and a black swan, and taught me to throw the boomerang; and
once, when he went to Sydney, he spent ever so much money to buy me a
silver bell for Lipse, my yellow lamb. I wonder if Dirk is living yet?
Do you think he is dead, Sir? I should be very much grieved, if he
were; for I promised I would come back to see him when I am a man."

--"_That_ is Dolores,--dear old Dolores! Isn't she fat?"

"Yes, and good, too, I should think, from the kind face she has. Who
was Dolores?"

"Ah! you never saw Dolores, did you? And you never heard her sing. She
was my Chilena nurse in Valparaiso; and she had a mother--oh, so very
old!--who lived in Santiago. We went once to see her; the other
Santiago--that was Dolores's son--drove us there in the _veloche_.
Wasn't it curious, his name should be the same as the city's? But he
was a bad boy, Santiago,--so mischievous! such a scamp! Father had to
whip him many times; and once the _vigilantes_ took him up, and would
have put him in the chain-gang, for cutting an American sailor with a
knife, in the Calle de San Francisco, if father had not paid five
ounces, and become security for his good behavior. But he ran away,
after all, and went as a common sailor in a nasty guano ship. Dolores
cried very much, and it was long before she would sing for me again.
Oh, she did know such delightful songs!--_Mi Nina_, and _Yo tengo Ojos
Negros_, and

"'No quiero, no quiero casarme;
Es mejor, es mejor soltera!'"

And the delightful little fellow merrily piped the whole of that "song
of pleasant glee," one of the most melodious and sauciest bits of
lyric coquetry to be found in Spanish.

"Ah," said he, "but I cannot sing it half so well as Dolores. She had
a beautiful guitar, with a blue ribbon, that her sweetheart gave her
before I was born, when she was young and very pretty;--he brought it
all the way from Acapulco."

--"And _that_ pretty girl is Juanita; she sold pine-apples and grapes
in the Almendral, and every night she would go with her guitar--it was
a very nice one, but did not cost near so much money as Dolores's--and
sing to the American gentlemen in the Star Hotel. My mother said she
was a naughty person, and that she did not dare tell where she got her
gold cross and those jet ear-rings. But I liked her very much, for all
that; and I'm sure she would not steal, for she used to give me a