iest if he can get a corner of
it. The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing. They
sing everything, America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French
shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to
comfort two families of that land. The flag goes to Dona Ina's, with the
candlesticks and the altar cloths, then Las Uvas eats tamales and dances
the sun up the slope of Pine Mountain.

You are not to suppose that they do not keep the Fourth, Washington's
Birthday, and Thanksgiving at the town of the grape vines. These make
excellent occasions for quitting work and dancing, but the Sixteenth is
the holiday of the heart. On Memorial Day the graves have garlands and
new pictures of the saints tacked to the headboards. There is great
virtue in an Ave said in the Camp of the Saints. I like that name which
the Spanish speaking people give to the garden of the dead, Campo Santo,
as if it might be some bed of healing from which blind souls and sinners
rise up whole and praising God. Sometimes the speech of simple folk
hints at truth the understanding does not reach. I am persuaded only a
complex soul can get any good of a plain religion. Your earthborn is a
poet and a symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements
a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other
people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof
that houses their God. Such as these go to church to be edified, but at
Las Uvas they go for pure worship and to entreat their God. The logical
conclusion of the faith that every good gift cometh from God is the open
hand and the finer courtesy. The meal done without buys a candle for the
neighbor's dead child. You do foolishly to suppose that the candle does
no good.

At Las Uvas every house is a piece of earth--thick walled, whitewashed
adobe that keeps the even temperature of a cave; every man is an
accomplished horseman and consequently bowlegged; every family keeps
dogs, flea-bitten mongrels that loll on the earthen floors. They speak
a purer Castilian than obtains in like villages of Mexico, and the way
they count relationship everybody is more or less akin. There is not
much villainy among them. What incentive to thieving or killing
can there be when there is little wealth and that to be had for the
borrowing! If they love too hotly, as we say "take their meat before
grace," so do their betters. Eh, what! shall a man b