Page:Vagabond life in Mexico.djvu/304

302 Her rounded arms were adorned in the upper part by the embroidery and lace of her cambric chemise, the rest remained bare. The contour of her fair shoulders was masked, but not entirely concealed, by a gorget of lace very like Arlesian. She wore shoes of the most beautiful satin, and a tress of her magnificent black hair was wound round a tortoise-shell comb mounted with massy gold. Her eyelids, cast down under the fiery glances that were shot from all sides at her, allowed one to see the long silken lashes with which they were fringed. She was not now the calm beauty that I had admired the evening before in the moonlight, but an impassioned daughter of the tropics in all her brilliancy.

The excitement among the spectators, increased by their frequent libations, became greater and greater every minute, but another and a more intense interest was soon awakened in the minds of the crowd.

"Ah!" cried a Jarocho at my side, whose hair was beginning to turn gray, "at the last fandango held at Malibran, Quilimaco lost one of his ears, and Juan de Dios the point of his nose, in a quarrel that arose about a beauty who was not worth a lock of hair compared with that girl there."

"Have patience, tio," answered another; "the beautiful Sacramenta has more than one aspirant in this village, and I venture to predict that, before night fall, she will have danced the machete and chamarra for two at least among us."

I did not understand what they meant, but the events that followed soon explained it. Two groups