My Latest Recollections Of La Tapera Are Concerned More With Demetria
Than The Piebalds.
She was not an elegant figure, as was natural in a
daughter of the grotesque Don Gregorio, but her
Countenance, as I have
said, was attractive on account of its colour and gentle wistful
expression, and being the daughter of a man rich in horses she did not
want for lovers. In those far-off days the idle, gay, well-dressed
young gambler was always a girl's first and often most successful
wooer, but at La Tapera the young lovers had to reckon with one who,
incredible as it seemed in a gaucho, hated gambling and kept a hostile
and rather terrifying eye on their approaches. Eventually Demetria
became engaged to a young stranger from a distance who had succeeded
in persuading the father that he was an eligible person and able to
provide for a wife.
Now it happened that the nearest priest in our part of the country
lived a long distance away, and to get to him and his little thatched
chapel one had to cross a swamp two miles wide in which one's horse
would sink belly-deep in miry holes at least a dozen times before one
could get through. In these circumstances the Gandara family could not
go to the priest, but managed to persuade him to come to them, and as
La Tapera was not considered a good enough place in which to hold so
important a ceremony, my parents invited them to have the marriage in
our house.
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