d as to Senor
Felipe's purpose about the time of the sheep-shearing, that it put him
in good humor for the day,--good humor with everybody, and himself most
of all. As he sat on the low bench, his head leaning back against the
whitewashed wall, his long legs stretched out nearly across the whole
width of the veranda, his pipe firm wedged in the extreme left corner
of his mouth, his hands in his pockets, he was the picture of placid
content. The troop of youngsters which still swarmed around the kitchen
quarters of Senora Moreno's house, almost as numerous and inexplicable
as in the grand old days of the General's time, ran back and forth
across Juan's legs, fell down between them, and picked themselves up by
help of clutches at his leather trousers, all unreproved by Juan, though
loudly scolded and warned by their respective mothers from the kitchen.

"What's come to Juan Can to be so good-natured to-day?" saucily asked
Margarita, the youngest and prettiest of the maids, popping her head out
of a window, and twitching Juan's hair. He was so gray and wrinkled
that the maids all felt at ease with him. He seemed to them as old as
Methuselah; but he was not really so old as they thought, nor they so
safe in their tricks. The old man had hot blood in his veins yet, as the
under-shepherds could testify.

"The sight of your pretty face, Senorita Margarita," answered Juan
quickly, cocking his eye at her, rising to his feet, and making a mock
bow towards the window.

"He! he! Senorita, indeed!" chuckled Margarita's mother, old Marda the
cook. "Senor Juan Canito is pleased to be merry at the doors of his
betters;" and she flung a copper saucepan full of not over-clean water
so deftly past Juan's head, that not a drop touched him, and yet he had
the appearance of having been ducked. At which bit of sleight-of-hand
the whole court-yard, young and old, babies, cocks, hens, and turkeys,
all set up a shout and a cackle, and dispersed to the four corners of
the yard as if scattered by a volley of bird-shot. Hearing the racket,
the rest of the maids came running,--Anita and Maria, the twins, women
forty years old, born on the place the year after General Moreno brought
home his handsome young bride; their two daughters, Rosa and Anita the
Little, as she was still called, though she outweighed her mother; old
Juanita, the oldest woman in the household, of whom even the Senora was
said not to know the exact age or history; and she, poor