Trooper Tales — page 244: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

228 A Soldier and a Man. - tive on the point of their mothers, they delighted in nursing the torrid venom which was in Eulalie’s nature, through their indelicate suggestions. There was another thing, however, which hurt her far more cruelly than the biting words of her little red sister maidens. It was the same thing which jarred upon the nerves of the trooper, who rode by with the main guard. And since the American cavalrymen had been quartered in the old Spanish barracks at Ciales, where Eulalie lived, she had truly learned the horrid pain which was her misfortune. There is majesty and ardor and romance in the dark Spanish eyes of the Porto Rican senoritas, but their teeth are imperfect, and this is because the rain-showered hills of their native land are full of sugar and acid. The sweetness is drawn up in the stalk of the cane and in the shaft of the cocoa-palm, and the acid is absorbed by the orange and lemon trees. The combination has spoiled the smile of many a red maiden, and caused tooth-ache remedies to rank next in importance to quinine in the chests of the regimental surgeon-major. When Eulalie was a very little girl there had come to her a deeper affliction. She remembered very little about it now—hardly anything except that a dark-faced fellow had struck her, and then kicked her afterward, because the hand which he had used was bleeding. After © that there was a dark hole, where Eulalie’s two front teeth should have been. Perhaps the little red maiden would never have cared had not the American cavalry- EComichbooksrco