grandfather was not stirring, she thought him asleep and began to prepare breakfast.  Strange, she was calm, she even had a desire to laugh!  What had she had last night to afflict her so?  She was not going very far, she could come every second day to visit the house, her grandfather could see her, and as for Basilio, he had known for some time the bad turn her father’s affairs had taken, since he had often said to her, “When I’m a physician and we are married, your father won’t need his fields.”

“What a fool I was to cry so much,” she said to herself as she packed her tampipi. Her fingers struck against the locket and she pressed it to her lips, but immediately wiped them from fear of contagion, for that locket set with diamonds and emeralds had come from a leper.  Ah, then, if she should catch that disease she could not get married.

As it became lighter, she could see her grandfather seated in a corner, following all her movements with his eyes, so she caught up her tampipi of clothes and approached him smilingly to kiss his hand.  The old man blessed her silently, while she tried to appear merry.  “When father comes back, tell him that I have at last gone to college—­my mistress talks Spanish.  It’s the cheapest college I could find.”

Seeing the old man’s eyes fill with tears, she placed the tampipi on her head and hastily went downstairs, her slippers slapping merrily on the wooden steps.  But when she turned her head to look again at the house, the house wherein had faded her childhood dreams and her maiden illusions, when she saw it sad, lonely, deserted, with the windows half closed, vacant and dark like a dead man’s eyes, when she heard the low rustling of the bamboos, and saw them nodding in the fresh morning breeze as though bidding her farewell, then her vivacity disappeared; she stopped, her eyes filled with tears, and letting herself fall in a sitting posture on a log by the wayside she broke out into disconsolate tears.

Juli had been gone several hours and the sun was quite high overhead when Tandang Selo gazed from the window at the people in their festival garments going to the town to attend the high mass.  Nearly all led by the hand or carried in their arms a little boy or girl decked out as if for a fiesta.

Christmas day in the Philippines is, according to the elders, a fiesta for the children, who are perhaps not of the same opinion and who, it may be supposed, have for it an instinctive dread.  They are roused early, washed, dressed, and decked out with everything new, dear, and precious that they possess—­high silk shoes, big hats, woolen or velvet suits, without overlooking four or five scapularies, which contain texts from St. John, and thus burdened they are carried to the high mass, where for almost an hour they are subjected to the heat and the human smells from so many crowding, perspiring people, and if they are not made to recite the rosary they must remain quiet, bored, or asleep.  At each movement or antic that may soil their clothing they are pinched and scolded, so the fact is that they do not laugh or feel happy, while in their round eyes can be read a protest against so much embroidery and a longing for the old shirt of week-days.