Page 15 - ramona-text

RAMONA 7

treme 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 them-
selves up by help of clutches at his leather trousers, all un-
reproved 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 iMargarita, 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," an-
swered 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 ap-
pearance 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 dis-
persed 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 tv/ins, women forty
years old, born on the place the year after General Moreno
brought home his handsome young bride; their two daugh-
ters, 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 thing, could tell
nothing, having been silly for ten years or more, good for
nothing except to shell beans: that she did as fast and well as