In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael. Katharine Lee Bates

on horseman might to this knight come near,

      Nor on other charger worthy of such a cavalier.

      “Thus, to and fro a-rushing, the fierce and furious steed,

      He snapped in twain his hither rein. ‘God pity now the Cid!’

      ‘God pity Diaz!’ cried the lords, but when they looked again,

      They saw Ruy Diaz ruling him with the fragment of his rein;

      They saw him proudly ruling with gesture firm and calm,

      Like a true lord commanding, and obeyed as by a lamb.

      “And so he led him foaming and panting to the King;

      But ‘No!’ said Don Alfonso, ‘it were a shameful thing

      That peerless Bavieca should ever be bestrid

      By any mortal but Bivar. Mount, mount again, my Cid!’ ”

      Rafael’s mind was still full of the Cid when, two or three days later, he was well enough to take a short ride on Shags outside the garden. The rough-coated, mouse-colored donkey carried his young master jauntily, being apparently well pleased to see him out again. Don Carlos, racking his memory for more ballads of the Cid, was walking beside Shags, when Pilarica, who had tripped on ahead and turned a corner, uttered a cry of distress. The father sprang forward and found the child on her knees in the dust of the highway, her face streaming with tears, while she held up her clasped hands in entreaty to a sullen-faced fellow who was brutally beating his ass. The poor creature, hardly more than skin and bones, was so cruelly overladen with sacks of charcoal that he had stumbled on a steep and stony bit of the road and broken the fastenings of one of the sacks, whose contents were merrily making off downhill like little black imps on a holiday. The peasant, in a fury, was dealing the ass great fisticuffs on the tender nose, and between the eyes, shut in patient endurance of the blows.

      Don Carlos had often seen animals beaten and had usually passed by with a shrug of annoyance, but the anguish of pity in his little daughter’s face and attitude suddenly smote him with an intolerable feeling, as if that horny fist were pounding his own heart.

      “Hold, there, my friend!” he protested. “Enough is as good as a feast. If you kill your donkey, who will carry the load?”

      The charcoal seller, his arm raised for another blow, stared in astonishment at the speaker.

      “You would do well to put your tongue in your pocket,” he growled. “This ass is mine, to beat if I choose and to kill if I choose. I am thinking that is what I will do, for his skin is the best of him now.”

      Pilarica rose and rushed to her father, her eyes their deepest pansy purple with beseeching.

      “Oh, dearest father, if you please! If you would kindly do me the favor! Instead of the doll with golden hair, if only you would give me this sweet, beautiful donkey!”

      Her father lifted her in his arms, so that the flushed, wet face was pressed against his own.

      “Do you mean it, Honeydrop? Think again. Do you really wish me to buy you this wretched ass in place of the wonderful dolly with Paris clothes, in the Granada shop? I am afraid there is not money enough for both.”

      “Oh, yes, yes!” entreated Pilarica. “The doll is happy in the shop-window, where she can see the children smile at her as they go by, but the donkey – oh, father, the donkey!”

      The peasant, whose arm had fallen to his side and who had been listening shrewdly, now stepped forward, touching his hat with a surly civility.

      “It’s not for the price of a basket of cabbages I would be selling my fine donkey. I’m a poor man, your Worship. All that God has given me for my portion in the world is morning and evening, three pennyworths of poverty, and a bushel of children with the gullets of sharks. What would become of us all without my strong, good ass?”

      “I’ll give you two dollars for your dingy old rattlebones, my man, and that is twice what anybody else would be fool enough to give you,” said Don Carlos, holding out the coins.

      The charcoal-seller looked at them greedily, but still hung back.