silva

Look at old Silva--Antonio Silva. I've known him ever since I was a shaver.

But it was old Silva that made it just the same--caught two sprouts, when the tree was young, an' twisted 'em together.

"An' old Silva wound up by buyin' these five acres from grandfather.

That's what I brung you in for--the way old Silva an' all his tribe farms.

Why, Silva wouldn't sell these five acres for five hundred an acre cash down.

Why, the Silvas, the whole tribe of 'em, works a hundred acres in peas, eighty in tomatoes, thirty in asparagus, ten in pie-plant, forty in cucumbers, an'--oh, stacks of other things."

He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents.

At first he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him out.

He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.