Page:Tales of Today.djvu/211

Rh A fiancée?'

Ah! I wish it were a fiancée! No, a farmer’s daughter, with too much wealth for me, who am too poor and want to get money to win her.'

"He was well known throughout the countryside, was this Araquil, and we were all acquainted with his history, his love for the daughter of old Chegaray, a warm Guipuzcoa farmer, controlling four or five farms in this neighborhood and owner of hillsides where the apple trees bent beneath their weight of fruit and yielded cider in quantities–oh! it would have done you good to see. I have never tasted your French cider that they talk so much about, but isn’t it true that it is not as good as our cider of Guipuzcoa?–It is not I who make the assertion.

"Father Chegaray lived between Hernani and fort Santa Barbara, which you may have seen on your way here from Saint Sebastian. Old Chegaray was as proud of Pepa, his daughter, as an Andalusian woman is of her jewels. He would hold his head very erect when he conducted his little girl to vespers or to the romerias, at our season of merrymaking. It is at the romerias that the young folks become engaged to one another, frequently without the parents being consulted. How quickly it comes about, in the midst of laughter and the dance! A heart is captured and a life is given in exchange.

"Down yonder in the valley at Loyola, not very far from here, there lived in those days a tall, good-looking young scapegrace who was eternally fluttering about the pretty girls, and who had all the qualities, faith, which find favor in the eyes of young women, but not a single one of those that are regarded kindly