servant for the talent that he let be taken from him.





CHAPTER XIV

IN THE HOUSE OF THE STUDENTS


The house where Makaraig lived was worth visiting. Large and spacious,
with two entresols provided with elegant gratings, it seemed to be
a school during the first hours of the morning and pandemonium from
ten o'clock on. During the boarders' recreation hours, from the lower
hallway of the spacious entrance up to the main floor, there was a
bubbling of laughter, shouts, and movement. Boys in scanty clothing
played _sipa_ or practised gymnastic exercises on improvised trapezes,
while on the staircase a fight was in progress between eight or nine
armed with canes, sticks, and ropes, but neither attackers nor attacked
did any great damage, their blows generally falling sidewise upon the
shoulders of the Chinese pedler who was there selling his outlandish
mixtures and indigestible pastries. Crowds of boys surrounded him,
pulled at his already disordered queue, snatched pies from him,
haggled over the prices, and committed a thousand deviltries. The
Chinese yelled, swore, forswore, in all the languages he could jabber,
not omitting his own; he whimpered, laughed, pleaded, put on a smiling
face when an ugly one would not serve, or the reverse.

He cursed them as devils, savages, _no kilistanos_ [33] but that