I here hesitate before a little adventure which I would not make too
much of nor yet minify: it seems to me so gentle and winning. I had long
meant to buy a donkey, and I thought I could make no fitter beginning
to this end than by buying a donkey’s head-stall in the country where
donkeys are more respected and more brilliantly accoutred than anywhere
else in the whole earth. When I ventured to suggest my notion, or call
it dream, to our young guide, he instantly imagined it in its full
beauty, and he led us directly to a shop in the principal street which
for the richness and variety of the coloring in its display might
have been a florist’s shop. Donkeys’ trappings in brilliant yellow,
vermillion, and magenta hung from the walls, and head-stalls, gorgeously
woven and embroidered, dangled from the roof. Among them and under them
the donkeys’ harness-maker sat at his work, a short, brown, handsome
man with eyes that seemed the more prominent because of his close-shaven
head. We chose a headstall of such splendor that no heart could have
resisted it, and while he sewed to it the twine muzzle which Spanish
donkeys wear on their noses for the protection of the public, our guide
expatiated upon us, and said, among other things to our credit, that we
were from America and were going to take the head-stall back with us.
The harness-maker lifted his head alertly. “Where, in America?” and we
answered for ourselves, “From New York.”
Then the harness-maker rose and went to an inner doorway and called
through it something that brought out a comely, motherly woman as alert
as himself. She verified our statement for herself, and having paved
the way firmly for her next question she asked, “Do you know the Escuela
Mann?”
As well as our surprise would let us, we said that we knew the Mann
School, both where and what it was.
She waited with a sort of rapturous patience before saying, “My son, our
eldest son, was educated at the Escuela Mann, to be a teacher, and now
he is a professor in the Commercial College in Puerto Rico.”
If our joint interest in this did not satisfy her expectation I for my
part can never forgive myself; certainly I tried to put as much passion
into my interest as I could, when she added that his education at the
Escuela Mann was without cost to him. By this time, in fact, I was so
proud of the Escuela Mann that I could not forbear proclaiming that a
member of my own family, no less than the father of the grandson for
whose potential donkey I was buying that headstall, was one of the
architects of the Escuela Mann building.
She now vanished within, and when she came out she brought her daughter,
a gentle young girl who sat down and smiled upon us through the rest of
the interview. She brought also an armful of books, the Spanish-English
Ollendorff which her son had used in studying our language, his
dictionary, and the copy-book where he had written his exercises, with
two photographs of him, not yet too Americanized; and she showed us not
only how correctly but how beautifully his exercises were done. If I did
not admire these enough, again I cannot forgive myself, but she
seemed satisfied with what I did, and she talked on about him, not too
loquaciously, but lovingly and lovably as a mother should, and proudly
as the mother of such a boy should, though without vainglory; I have
forgotten to say that she had a certain distinction of face, and was
appropriately dressed in black. By this time we felt that a head-stall
for such a donkey as I was going to buy was not enough to get of such
people, and I added a piece of embroidered leather such as goes in Spain
on the front of a donkey’s saddle; if we could not use it so, in final
defect of the donkey, we could put it on a veranda chair. The saddler
gave it at so low a price that we perceived he must have tacitly abated
something from the visual demand, and when we did not try to beat him
down, his wife went again into that inner room and came out with an
iron-holder of scarlet flannel backed with canvas, and fringed with
magenta, and richly inwrought with a Moorish design, in white, yellow,
green, and purple. I say Moorish, because one must say something, but
if it was a pattern of her own invention the gift was the more precious
when she bestowed it on the sister of one of the architects of the
Escuela Mann. That led to more conversation about the Escuela Mann, and
about the graduate of it who was now a professor in Puerto Rico, and we
all grew such friends, and so proud of one another, and of the country
so wide open to the talents without cost to them, that when I asked
her if she would not sometime be going to America, her husband answered
almost fiercely in his determination, “I am going when I have learned
English!” and to prove that this was no idle boast, he pronounced some
words of our language at random, but very well. We parted in a glow of
reciprocal esteem and I still think of that quarter-hour as one of my
happiest; and whatever others may say, I say that to have done such a
favor to one Spanish family as the Escuela Mann had been the means of
our nation doing this one was a greater thing than to have taken Cuba
from Spain and bought the Philippines when we had seized them already
and had led the Filipinos to believe that we meant to give their islands
to them.