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Checco, the butcher, who sells his meat cut into dark, indescribably-shaped scraps, more fit for dogs than men, first sees the carriage turn into the piazza. He passes the word on to Oreste, the barber round the corner.
While he played his interminable exercises he heard a proud voice inside himself saying over and over again: "I am a composer a great composer." From that day on, since he was a composer, he set himself to composing. Before he had even learned to write, he continued to cipher crotchets and quavers on scraps of paper, which he tore from the household account-books.
When one side was pretty well done he turned the other, and, while that was cooking, cut off a few scraps from the half-roasted side and tried them. We need scarcely add that none of the party were particular. The birds were disposed of in an incredibly short time, and then the pipes were refilled for a second smoke.
In spite of this queer make-up, the Patchwork Girl was magically alive and had proved herself not the least jolly and agreeable of the many quaint characters who inhabit the astonishing Fairyland of Oz. Indeed, Scraps was a general favorite, although she was rather flighty and erratic and did and said many things that surprised her friends.
And in the right spirit, too, walking into each kitchen and taking the best offen the stove no left-over scraps in her offering to the Lord, and she have gave a lesson to grown-ups. We all love the old folks and was ready to do, but 'Liza have proved that love must be mixed with a little gumption to make wheels go round. And ain't she cute about it?
It was not long before Waddles was dispensing nourishment from the lowered tail-gate, ladling food and hot coffee into the plates and cups which the men held out to him. They drew away and sat cross-legged on the ground. The meal was almost finished when six horsemen rode down the valley and pulled up before the wagon. "What's the chance for scraps?" the leader asked.
And at the road-house we learned that the boy's theory of their movements was the right one. They came across the twelve or fourteen miles every day for such scraps as they could pick up. So here was our first white man in sixteen days, an intelligent man of meagre education, with a great bent for versifying.
Look over our history from that Treaty of Paris in 1783, down through the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manila Bay; look at the facts. You will see that no matter how acrimoniously England has quarreled with us, these were always family scraps, in which she held out for her own interests just as we did for ours.
I, that have been zany in cap and bells for a strolling variety show drudge and Jack-of-all-trades to the matadors in the bull-fighting ring; I, that have been slave to every black beast who cared to set his foot on my neck; I, that have been starved and spat upon and trampled under foot; I, that have begged for mouldy scraps and been refused because the dogs had the first right?
In his distress the old man had turned to his beloved instrument as one turns to an old friend. But now the tunes were never merry, only scraps and fragments of songs of love and despair, the melancholy folk-songs of his native land, long since forgotten, and now returning to his memory as its hold on the present grew feebler.
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