Page:Face to Face With the Mexicans.djvu/59

 had wrung my heart. They soon learned to divine my sympathetic interest in them, and occasionally some of them would stop before my window, and exchange with me amusing remarks. They were very bright, and laughed incredulously, exchanging winks and nods with each other, when I tried to make them believe that I was a Mexican. I asked if they could not see from my dark hair and eyes that I was one ; but they refused to be convinced, saying: "You may look like a Mexican, but you can't talk like one." In the course of time, all shyness vanished, and often, when in other parts of the house, the young voices gleefully calling "Señorita! Señorita!" would bring me to the drawing-room, and there would be my barred windows, full of little dark mischievous faces, their brown hands stretched out to me through the iron bars, through which their dancing eyes peeped. When my housekeeping was in better running order — comparatively speaking, of course — I sometimes gave them trifling dainties. Cakes they accepted gladly, but when in my patriotic zeal I tried to familiarize them with that bulwark of our Southern civilization — the soda biscuit — they rejected it uncompromisingly, spitting and sputtering after a taste of it, and saying: "No nos gusta" ("We don't like it"), "Good for Americans — no good for Mexicans."

A pretty child in a nurse's arms stopped before the window, and laid her tiny brown hand on me caressingly. Nurse told her to sing a pretty song for the señora, when she began :

I asked her to come again, and as they moved along the pretty creature waved her hand at me, saying: “''Mañana! en la mañanita''" ("Tomorrow morning very early "), which aroused my fears, justly enough,