“Is he dead?” we queried hoarsely.

“He was dead,” replied the cook, with seriousness:  “he is not dead now.”

With this light and delicate touch the cook swept the gamut of our emotions from awe at little Panchot’s sudden taking off to pleasure at his speedy resurrection.  We repaired at once to Madame Alguin’s residence to view the subject of this miracle:  lest the miracle should not be so complete as one might wish, we carried with us a little hartshorn and Pond’s extract.  Madame Alguin’s villa was a fine wide-spreading live-oak, with a tent as a sort of annex, about two minutes from the ranch.  On our arrival we found four Mexican women, seven children, one man, three dogs, four goats, and several roosters, gathered round the form of little Panchot stretched beneath the live-oak.  A fire smouldered a little way off, and a cradle hung from the branch of the fatherly tree.  Little Panchot had a nasty cut about an inch long through his cheek.  He had been herding his goats on the bank of the creek when he was knocked over by a stone from the other side.  He swooned,—­then he was dead; he came to,—­and, presto, he was alive again.  He was soon running about with his wonted friskiness, and making himself useful in chasing wild tennis-balls.  This little boy’s mother was, poor woman, very much of a sloven, but he had a string of little sisters who were as nice as could be.  They went about in white cotton gowns—­amazingly clean, considering that they lived under a tree—­tied at the waist with red scarfs; their black hair was smoothly gathered at the backs of their pretty heads, and they had a demure and quaintly maternal air; they looked at you with a tranquil, moon-like gaze, which seemed to say that their ideas, which were on the way, had tarried for the moment in some boon southern country.

III.

In riding about the range it was very pleasant to find, as one constantly did, by the side of some “motte” (Texan for a considerable cluster of scrub growth), or beneath the shade of a great live-oak, or on the barren face of a divide, the little canvas A-tents of the herders, nestled cosily to circular pens for the sheep, and generally surrounded by brush to prevent the intrusion of inquisitive cattle.  Within the tent a sheepskin or so, stretched on the ground or on a lattice of branches, for his bed, and without, a padlocked chest, with a coffee mill screwed to the top, in which he keeps his rations, a skillet and a few other utensils hanging from the branches of a neighboring tree, a whitened buffalo’s skull for a metate, a smouldering fire,—­this little spot, with its surrounding fence shutting out the solitude, is the herder’s palace, schloss, villa, town-and country-house. “Seguro,” says Juan, as he lights a brown cigarette and quenches the yellow fuse in an empty cartridge-shell, “man wants but little here below.”  They were a genial and hospitable set, the herders, and if one