We then settled down to _mate_ and quiet conversation. Sitting
in the kitchen on the skull of a horse--a common article of furniture
in an Oriental _rancho_--was a boy about twelve years old, one
of Lucero's grandchildren, with a very beautiful face. His feet were
bare and his clothes very poor, but his soft dark eyes and olive face
had that tender, half-melancholy expression often seen in children of
Spanish origin, which is always so strangely captivating.

"Where is your guitar, Cipriano?" said his grandfather, addressing
him, whereupon the boy rose and fetched a guitar, which he first
politely offered to me.

When I had declined it, he seated himself once more on his polished
horse-skull and began to play and sing. He had a sweet boy's voice,
and one of his ballads took my fancy so much that I made him repeat
the words to me while I wrote them down in my notebook, which greatly
gratified Lucero, who seemed proud of the boy's accomplishment. Here
are the words translated almost literally, therefore without rhymes,
and I only regret that I cannot furnish my musical readers with the
quaint, plaintive air they were sung to:

O let me go--O let me go,
Where high are born amidst the hills
The streams that gladden all the south,
And o'er the grassy desert wide,
Where slakes his thirst the antlered deer,
Hurry towards the great green ocean.

The stony hills--the stony hills,