the other hand,
his father and the other people in the shop admired the ease with which
he could reproduce objects in a simple, ingenuous drawing, in which no
detail of naturalness was lacking. His pockets were always full of bits
of charcoal and he never saw a wall or stone that had a suggestion of
whiteness, without at once tracing on it a copy of the objects that
struck his eyes because of some marked peculiarity. The outside walls of
the shop were black with little Mariano's drawings. Along the walls ran
the pigs of Saint Anthony, with their puckered snouts and twisted tails,
that wandered through the village and were supported by public charity,
to be raffled on the festival of the saint. And in the midst of this
stout procession stood out the profiles of the blacksmith and all the
workmen of the shop, with an inscription beneath, that no doubt might
arise as to their identity.

"Come here, woman," the blacksmith would shout to his sick wife when he
discovered a new sketch. "Come and see what our son has done. A devil of
a boy!"

And influenced by this enthusiasm, he no longer complained when Mariano
ran away from school and the bellows rope to spend the whole day running
through the valley or the village, a piece of charcoal in his hand,
covering the rocks of the mountain and the house walls with black lines,
to the despair of the neighbors. In the tavern in the Plaza Mayor he had
traced the heads of the most constant customers, and the innkeeper
pointed them out proudly, forbidding anyone to touch the wall for fear
the sketches would disappear. This work was a source of vanity to the
blacksmith when Sundays, after mass, he went in to drink a glass with
his friends. On the wall of the rectory he had traced a Virgin, before
which the most pious old women in the village stopped with deep sighs.

The blacksmith with a flush of satisfaction accepted all the praises
that were showered on the little fellow as if they belonged in large
part to himself. Where had that prodigy come from, when all the rest of
his family were such brutes? And he nodded affirmatively when the
village notables spoke of doing something for the boy. To be sure, he
did not know what to do, but they were right; his Mariano was not
destined to hammer iron like his father. He might become as great a
personage as Don Rafael, a gentleman who painted saints in the capital
of the province and was a teacher of painting in a big house, full of
picture