Page:Our Sister Republic - Mexico.djvu/512

494 come out of the ring. So I told my padrino I would fight him a little but do not feel very well.

"He said: "It is better you should throw the bandarillas into the bull's neck. I will attract the attention of the bull, and when you are ready to throw, you call out and I will jump aside."

"I said I would do so, and my padrino went up to the bull, and begun to dance around before his nose. Then I ran up to throw the bandarillas, but I was so excited that I have forgotten to call out to him to get out of the way, and, when I let them go they strike him in the back instead of the bull. Then my padrino he bellow louder as ever the bull should do, and begin to dance like a tarantula and catch at the bandarillas. At last he got hold of them and tore the barbs out of his flesh. Then he runs over to me and pulls me down, and begin to beat me over the head and the back with the flat side of his sword, and his foot and he says:

"Look here you now! It is better before we go any further, that one thing shall be understood immediate. Are you the padrino of me, or the padrino of the bull?"

"He was so very angry that I could not say an explanation, and so I told him I would- go home, for I like not the sport, and it might make us bad friends or something if we kept on. Some of the oranges and apples and things which they throwed at me as I went out were very solid, and I left the town that night. Since then I have had no quarrel with the bulls, and I like not to have any more."

While waiting at Vera Cruz for the arrival of Mr. Seward from Orizaba, and the departure of the good steamer Cleopatra which was to bear us away, at last,