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-                       FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN
-
-
-
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost
-no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Title: Four Months Afoot in Spain
-
-Author: Harry A. Franck
-
-Release Date: July 27, 2012 [EBook #40357]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Al Haines.
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Cover]
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Map showing the author's itinerary]
-
-
-
-
-                            HARRY A. FRANCK
-
-
-
-                           FOUR MONTHS AFOOT
-                                IN SPAIN
-
-
-
-
-                    GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC,
-                         GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
-
-
-
-
-                COPYRIGHT 1911, BY THE CENTURY CO.  ALL
-             RIGHTS RESERVED.  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
-             AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
-
-
-
-
-                               A FOREWORD
-
-
-Yet another story of travels in western Europe, especially one having
-for its basis the mere random wanderings of a four-months' absence from
-home, may seem almost to call for apology.  If so, it is hereby duly
-tendered.  What befell me on this vacation jaunt is no story of
-harrowing adventure, nor yet a record of the acquisition of new facts.
-But as I covered a thousand miles of the Iberian peninsula on foot,
-twice that distance by third-class rail, and am given to mingling with
-"the masses," it may be that there have filtered into the following
-pages some facts and impressions that will be new to the reader. Yet it
-is less to record these that I have written, than to answer a question
-that has often been put to me since my return:
-
-"How can a man make such a journey on $172?"
-
-THE AUTHOR.
-
-
-
-
-                                CONTENTS
-
-CHAPTER
-
-
-      I. A 'Tweendecks Journey
-     II. Footpaths of Andalusia
-    III. The Last Foothold of the Moor
-     IV. The Banks of the Guadalquivir
-      V. The Torero at Home
-     VI. Tramping Northward
-    VII. Spanish Roads and Roadsters
-   VIII. On the Road in La Mancha
-     IX. The Trail of the Priest
-      X. Shadows of the Philips
-     XI. Crumbling Cities
-    XII. Wildest Spain
-   XIII. The Land of the Basque
-    XIV. A Descent into Aragon
-     XV. Emigrating Homeward
-
-
-
-
-                       FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER I
-
-                         A 'TWEENDECKS JOURNEY
-
-
-Not the least of the virtues of the private schools of New York City is
-the length of their summer vacations.  It was an evening late in May
-that I mounted to my lodgings in Hartley Hall, rollicksome with the
-information that I should soon be free from professional duties a full
-four months. Where I preferred to spend that term of freedom was easily
-decided.  Except for one migratory "year off," I had not been so long
-outside a classroom since my fifth birthday; and it seemed fully as far
-back that I had begun to dream of tramping through Spain.  If the desire
-had in earlier days battened on mere curiosity, it found more rational
-nourishment now in my hope of acquiring greater fluency in the Spanish
-tongue, the teaching of which, with other European languages, was the
-source of my livelihood.
-
-There was one potent obstacle, however, to my jubilant planning.  When I
-had set aside the smallest portion of my savings that could tide me over
-the first month of autumn, there was left a stark one hundred and
-seventy-two dollars.  The briefest of mathematical calculations
-demonstrated that such a sum could cover but scantily one hundred and
-twenty days.  Yet the blithesome project would not be put to rout by
-mere figures.  I had been well schooled at least in the art of spending
-sparingly; with a long summer before me I was not averse to a bit of
-adventure, even the adventure of falling penniless in foreign lands.  A
-permanent stranding was easily averted--I had but to leave in trust a
-sum sufficient for repatriation, to be forwarded to whatever corner of
-the globe insolvency might overhaul me.  Which, being done, I pocketed
-in express checks and cash the remainder of my resources--to-wit, one
-hundred and thirty-two dollars--tossed into a battered suit-case a
-summer's supply of small clothes and a thread-bare costume for ship
-wear, and set out to discover what portion of the Iberian peninsula
-might be surveyed with such equipment.
-
-Thus it was that on the morning of June first I boarded the "L" as usual
-at One Hundred and Sixteenth street; but took this time the west side
-express instead of the local that screeches off at Fifty-third into the
-heart of the city.  A serge suit of an earlier vintage and double-soled
-oxfords were the chief articles of my attire, reduced already to Spanish
-simplicity except for the fleckless collar and the cracked derby I had
-donned for the flight through exacting Manhattan.  As for the suitcase
-that rocked against the platform gate as we roared southward, it was
-still far from a pedestrian's scrip. For with the ambitious resolution
-to rectify during the long sea voyage before me some of the sins of
-omission, I had stuffed into it at the last moment a dozen classic
-volumes in Sixth-avenue bindings.
-
-"Christ'fer!" croaked the guard.
-
-I descended to the street and threaded my way to the ferry.  Across the
-river Hoboken was thronged with luggage-laden mankind, swarthy sons and
-daughters of toil for the most part; an eddying stream of which the
-general trend was toward a group of steamship docks.  With it I was
-borne into a vast two-story pier, strewn below with everything that
-ships transport across the seas and resounding above with the voice of
-an excited multitude.  Near the center of the upper wharf stood an
-isolated booth bearing a transient sign-board:
-
-                            "SCHNELLDAMPFER.
-                           PRINZESSIN ----."
-
-
-Within, sat a coatless, broad-gauge Teuton, puffing at a stogie.
-
-"Third-class to Gibraltar," I requested, stooping to peer through the
-wicket.
-
-The German reached mechanically for a pen and began to fill in a leaf of
-what looked like a large check-book.  Then he paused and squinted out
-upon me:
-
-Ah--er--you mean _steerage_?"
-
-"Steerage, mein Herr; to Gibraltar."
-
-He signed the blue check and pushed it toward me, still holding it
-firmly by one corner.
-
-"Thirty dollars and fifty cents," he rumbled.
-
-I paid it and, ticket in hand, wormed my way to the nearer of two
-gangways.  Here I was repulsed; but at the second, an officer of
-immaculate exterior but for two very bleary eyes, tore off a corner of
-the blue check and jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the steamer
-behind him.  As I set foot on her deck a seaman sprang up suddenly from
-the scuppers and hurled at my chest a tightly rolled blanket.  I caught
-it without a fumble, having once dabbled in football, and, spreading it
-out on a hatch, disclosed to view a deep tin plate, a huge cup, a knife,
-fork and spoon of leaden hue, and a red card announcing itself as "Buono
-per una razione."
-
-A hasty inspection of the _Prinzessen_ ---- confirmed a suspicion that
-she would not offer the advantages of the steamers plying the northern
-route. She was a princess indeed, a sailor's princess, such as he may
-find who has the stomach to search in the dives along West street or
-down on the lower Bowery.  At her launching she had, perhaps, justified
-her christening; but long years have passed since she was degraded to
-the unfastidious southern service.
-
-The steerage section, congested now with disheveled Latins and cumbrous
-bundles, comprised the forward main deck, bounded on the bow by the
-forecastlehead and aft by an iron wall that rose a sheer eight feet to
-the first-class promenade, above which opened the hurricane deck and
-higher still the wheelhouse and bridge.  This space was further limited
-by two large hatchways, covered with tarpaulins, of which a corner of
-each was thrown back to disclose two dark holes like the mouths of a
-mine.  By these one entered the third-class quarters, of which the
-forward was assigned to "single men" and the other to any species of the
-human race that does not fall into that category.  I descended the first
-by a perpendicular ladder to a dungeon where all but utter darkness
-reigned.  As my eyes accustomed themselves to this condition, there grew
-up about me row after row of double-decked bunks, heaped with indistinct
-shapes.  I approached the nearest and was confronted by two wolfish
-eyes, then another pair and another flashed up about me on every side.
-My foresighted fellow-passengers, having preëmpted sleeping-space, were
-prepared to hold their claims by force of arms--and baggage.
-
-Every berth seemed to be taken.  I meandered in and out among them until
-in a far corner I found one empty; but as I laid a hand upon its edge, a
-cadaverous youth sprang at me with a plaintive whine, "E mío! è mío!"  I
-returned to the central space.  A sweater-clad sailor whom I had not
-made out before was standing at the edge of an opening in the deck
-similar to that above.
-
-"Qui non ch' è più," he said; "Giù!"
-
-I descended accordingly to a second bridewell below the water-line and
-lighted only by a feeble electric bulb in the ceiling.  Here half the
-bunks were unoccupied.  I chose one athwartships against the forward
-bulkhead--a wooden bin containing a burlap sack of straw--tossed into it
-blanket and baggage, and climbed again to daylight and fresh air.
-
-At eleven the sepulchral bass of the steamer sounded, the vast pier,
-banked with straining faces and fluttering handkerchiefs, began slowly
-to recede, sweeping with it the adjoining city, until all Hoboken had
-joined in the flight to the neighboring hills.  We were off.  I pitched
-overboard the cracked derby and crowded with a half-thousand others to
-the rail, eager for the long-anticipated pleasure of watching the
-inimitable panorama of New York grow smaller and smaller and melt away
-on the horizon.  But we were barely abreast the Battery when three
-officers, alleging the impossibility of checking their human cargo on
-the open deck, ordered the entire steerage community below. When, long
-after, it came my turn to be released, my native land was utterly
-effaced, and the deck was spattering with a chilling rain before which
-we retreated and frittered away the remnant of the day with amical
-advances and bachelor banter.
-
-In the morning the scene was transformed. Almost without exception my
-fellow-voyagers had changed from the somber garb of America to the
-picturesque comfort of their first landing in the Western world.  The
-steerage deck, flooded with sunshine, resembled the _piazza_ of some
-Calabrian city on a day of festival.  Women in many-hued vesture and
-brilliant _fazzoletti_ sat in groups on the hatches, suckling their
-babes or mirthful over their knitting.  Along the rail lounged men in
-bag-like trousers and tight-fitting jackets of velveteen, with broad
-scarlet sashes.  Jaunty, deep-chested youths strolled fore and aft
-angling for glances from winsome eyes.  Unromantic elders squatted in
-circles about the deck, screaming over games of mora; in and out among
-them all raced sportive bambini. High up on a winch sat a slender fellow
-Turkish fashion, thumbing a zither.
-
-Though there was not one beside myself to whom that tongue was native,
-English was still the dominating language.  Except for a handful of
-Greeks, the entire 'tweendecks company hailed from southern Italy or her
-islands.  But force of habit or linguistic pride still gave full sway to
-the slang-strewn speech of east New York or the labor camp.  There were
-not a few who might have expressed themselves far more clearly in some
-other medium, yet when I addressed them in Italian silence was
-frequently the response.  The new world was still too close astern to
-give way to the spell of the old.
-
-But it was in their mother tongue that I exchanged the first confidences
-with three young men with whom I passed many an hour during the journey.
-The mightiest was Antonio Massarone, a vociferous giant of twenty, whose
-scorn was unbounded for those of his race who had pursued fortune no
-further than the over-peopled cities of our eastern coast.  Emigration
-had carried him to the mines of Nevada, and it was seldom that he
-refrained from patting his garnished waistband when tales of experience
-were exchanging.  But the time had come when he must give up his
-princely wage of three dollars a day and return for years of drudgery
-and drill at as many cents, or forever forfeit the right to dwell in his
-native land.  When his term was ended he would again turn westward;
-before that glad day comes what a stalwart task confronts certain
-officers of the Italian army!
-
-Nicolò, too, expected to return.  In fact, of all the steerage community
-a very few had resolved to remain at home, and for each of these there
-were a score who had emigrated a half-dozen times in the face of similar
-resolutions.  Nicolò was a bootblack, proud of his calling and envious
-of no other. Already there hovered in his day dreams a three-chair
-"parlor" in which his station should be nearest the door and bordering
-on the cash-register.  Conscription called him also, but he approached
-the day of recruiting light of heart, knowing a man of four feet nine
-would be quickly rejected.
-
-As for Pietro Scerbo, the last of our quartet, his home-coming was
-voluntary, for the family obligation to the army had already been
-fulfilled by two older brothers.  Pietro had spent his eighteen months
-kneading spaghetti dough in the Bronx at seven dollars a week; and he
-physically quaked at the sarcasm of 'Tonio on the subject of wages.
-Still he was by no means returning empty-handed.  "To be sure, I am not
-rich with gold, like 'Tonio," he confessed one day, when the miner was
-out of earshot, "but I have spent only what I must--two dollars in the
-boarding-house, sometimes some clothes, and in the winter each week six
-lire to hear Caruso."
-
-Thirty dollars a month and the peerless-voiced a necessity of life!  I,
-too, had been a frequent "standee" at the Metropolitan, yet had as often
-charged myself with being an extravagant young rascal.
-
-The steerage rations on the _Prinzessin_ were in no way out of keeping
-with her general unattractiveness. Those who kept to their bunks until
-expelled by the seaman whose duties included the daily fumigation of the
-dungeons, were in no way the losers for being deprived of the infantile
-roll and the strange imitation of coffee that made up the European
-breakfast. Sea breezes bring appetite, however, especially on a faintly
-rippling ocean, and it was not strange that, though the dinner-hour came
-early, even racial lethargy fled at its announcement.  Long before noon
-a single jangle of the steward's bell cut short all morning pastimes and
-instantly choked the passages to the lower regions with a clamorous,
-jocose struggle of humanity as those on deck dived below for their
-meal-hour implements and collided with the foresighted, fighting their
-way up the ladders. Once disentangled, we filed by the mouth of the
-culinary cavern under the forecastlehead, to receive each a ladleful of
-the particular pièce de résistance of the day, a half-grown loaf of
-bread, and a brimming cupful of red wine.  Thus laden, each squirmed his
-way through the multitude and made table of whatever space offered,--on
-the edge of a hatch, the drum of a winch, or on the deck itself.
-Unvaryingly day by day boiled beef alternated with pork and beans.  Then
-there was macaroni, not alternately, nor yet moderately, but
-ubiquitously, fourteen days a week; for supper was in no way different
-from dinner even in the unearthly hour of its serving.  It was tolerably
-coarse macaroni, but otherwise no worse than omnipresent macaroni must
-be when boiled by the barrel under the watchful eye of a rotund,
-torpescent, bath-fearing, tobacco-loving, Neapolitan ship's cook.  For
-the wine we were supremely grateful; not that it was particularly good
-wine, but such as it was not even the pirates in the galley could make
-it worse.
-
-The ensembled climax of this daily extravaganza, however, had for its
-setting the steerage "washroom," an iron cell furnished with two
-asthmatic salt-water faucets.  To it dashed first the long experienced
-in the quick-lunch world, and on their heels the competing multitude.
-The 'tweendecks strongholds housed six hundred, the "wash-room" six,
-whence it goes without saying that the minority was always in power and
-the majority howling for admittance and a division of the spoils.  Yet
-dissension, as is wont, was rampant even among the sovereign.  From
-within sounded the splashing of water, the tittering of jostled damsels,
-or the shouting for passage of one who had resigned his post and must
-run the gauntlet to freedom through a vociferous raillery.  In due time
-complete rotation in office was accomplished, but it was ever a late
-hour when the last gourmand emerged from the alleyway and carried his
-dripping utensils below.
-
-The _Prinzessin_ plowed steadily eastward.  Gradually, as the scent of
-the old world came stronger to our nostrils, the tongue of the West fell
-into disuse. Had I been innocent of Italian I must soon have lost all
-share in the general activities.  As it was, I had the entrée to each
-group; even the solemn socialists, seated together behind the winch
-planning the details of the portending reversal of society, did not
-lower their voices as I passed.
-
-How little akin are anticipation and realization! Ever before on the
-high seas it had been my part to labor unceasingly among cattle pens or
-to bear the moil of watch and watch; and the unlimited leisure of the
-ticketed had seemed always fit object for envy.  Yet here was I myself
-at last crossing the Atlantic as a passenger, and weary already of this
-forced inactivity before the voyage was well begun.  The first full day,
-to be sure, had passed delightfully, dozing care-free in the sun or
-striding through the top-most volume in my luggage.  But before the
-second was ended reading became a bore; idling more fatiguing than the
-wielding of a coal-shovel.  On the third, I sauntered down into the
-forecastle more than half inclined to suggest to one of its inmates a
-reversal of rôles; but the watch below greeted me with that chill
-disdain accorded mere passengers, never once lapsing into the masculine
-banter that would have marked my acceptance as an equal.  As a last
-resort I set off on long pedestrian tours of the deck, to the
-astonishment of the lounging Latins, though now and then some youth
-inoculated with the restlessness of the West, notably 'Tonio, fell in
-with me for a mile or two.
-
-It was the miner, too, who first accepted my challenge to a bout of
-hand-wrestling and quickly brought me undeserved fame by sprawling prone
-on his back, when, had he employed a tithe of science, he might have
-tossed me into the scuppers.  From the moment of its introduction this
-exotic pastime won great popularity.  Preliminary jousts filled the
-morning hours; toward evening the hatches were transformed into
-grandstands from which the assembled third-class populace cheered on the
-panting contestants and greeted each downfall with a cannonade of
-laughter, in which even the vanquished joined.
-
-More constant and universal than all else, however, was the demand for
-music.  The most diffident possessor of a mouth-organ or a jew's-harp
-knew no peace during his waking hours.  Great was the joy when, as dusk
-was falling on the second day out, a Calabrian who had won fortune and
-corpulence as a grocer in Harlem, clambered on deck, straining
-affectionately to his bosom a black box with megaphone attachment.
-
-"E un fonógrafo," he announced proudly; "a present I take to the old
-madre at home."  He warded off with his elbows the exultant uprising and
-deposited the instrument tenderly on a handkerchief spread by his wife
-on a corner of the hatch.  "For a hundred dollars, signori!" he cried;
-"Madre di Dío!  How she will wonder if there is a little man in the box!
-For on the first day, signori, I do not tell her how the music is put in
-the fonógrafo, ha! ha! ha! not for a whole day!"--and the joke came
-perilously near to choking him into apoplexy long before its
-perpetration.
-
-A turn of the key and the apparatus struck up "La donna è móbile," the
-strikingly clear tones floating away on the evening air to blend with
-the wash of the sea on our bow.  A hush fell over the forward deck; into
-the circle of faces illumed by the swinging ship's lantern crept the
-mirage of dreams; a sigh sounded in the black night of the outskirts.
-
-"E Bonci, amici," whispered the Calabrian as the last note died away.
-
-The announcement was superfluous; no one else could have sung the
-sprightly little lyric with such perfection.
-
-Bits of other operas followed, plantation melodies, and the monologues
-of witty Irishmen; but always the catholic instrument came back to "La
-donna è móbile," and one could lean back on one's elbows and fancy the
-dapper little tenor standing in person on the corner of the hatch,
-pouring out his voice to his own appreciative people.
-
-Thereafter as regularly as the twilight appeared the Calabrian with his
-"fonógrafo."  The forward deck took to sleeping by day that the evening
-musicale might be prolonged into the small hours. Whatever its
-imperfections, the little black box did much to charm away the monotony
-of the voyage, in its early stages.
-
-But good fortune is rarely perennial.  One night in mid-Atlantic a
-first-class passenger of the type that adds, by contrast, to the
-attractiveness of the steerage, his arms about the waists of two damsels
-old enough to have known better, paused to hang over the rail.  Bonci
-was singing.  The promenader surveyed the oblivious multitude below in
-silence until the aria ended, then turned on his heel with a snort of
-contempt.  The maidens giggled, the affectionate trio strolled aft, and
-a moment later the cabin piano was jangling a Broadway favorite.  When I
-turned my head the Calabrian was closing his instrument.
-
-"No, amici, no more," he said as protest rose; "We must not annoy the
-rich signori up there."
-
-Nor could he be moved to open the apparatus again as long as the voyage
-lasted.
-
-Amid the general merriment of home-coming was here and there a note of
-sadness in the caverns of the _Prinzessin_.  On a hatch huddled day by
-day, when, the sun was high, a family of three, doomed to early
-extinction by the white-faced scourge of the north. Below, it was
-whispered, lay an actress once famous in the Italian quarter, matched in
-a race with death to her native village.  A toil-worn Athenian, on
-life's down grade, who had been robbed on the very eve of sailing of
-seven years' earnings of pick and shovel, tramped the deck from dawn to
-midnight with sunken head, refusing either food or drink. Now and again
-he stepped to the rail to shake his knotted fist at the western horizon,
-stretched his arms on high, and took up again his endless march.
-
-Then there were the deported--seven men whose berths were not far from
-my own.  One had shown symptoms of trachoma; another bore the mark of a
-bullet through one hand; a third was a very Hercules, whom the port
-doctors had pronounced flawless, but who had landed with four dollars
-less than the twenty-five required.  With this single exception,
-however, one could not but praise the judgment of Ellis Island.  The
-remaining four were dwarfish Neapolitans, little more than wharf rats;
-and the best of Naples bring little that is desirable.  Yet one could
-not but pity the unpleasing little wretches, who had risen so far above
-their environment as to save money in a place where money is bought
-dearly, and whose only reward for years of repression of every appetite
-had been a month of misery and frustration.
-
-"Porca di Madonna!" cursed the nearest, pointing to three small blue
-scars on his neck; "For nothing but these your infernal doctors have
-made me a beggar!"
-
-"On the sea, when it was too late," whined his companion, "they told me
-we with red eyes should not go to New York, but to a city named Canada.
-Madre dí Dío!  Why did I not take my ticket to this Canada?"
-
-"You will next time?" I hinted.
-
-"Next time!" he shrieked, dropping from his bunk as noiselessly as a
-cat.  "Is there a next time with a book like that?"  He shook in my face
-the libretto containing a record of his activities since birth, lacking
-which no Italian of the proletariat may live in peace in his own land
-nor embark for another.  Across every page was stamped indelibly the
-word "deported."
-
-"They ruined it, curse them!  It's something in your maledetta American
-language that tells the police not to let me go and the agenzia not to
-sell me a ticket.  My book is destroyed!  Sono scomunicato!  And where
-shall I get the money for this next time, díceme?  To come to America I
-have worked nine, ten, sangue della Vergine! how do I know how many
-years!  Why did I not take the ticket to this Canada?"
-
-On the morning of June seventh we raised the Azores; at first the
-dimmest blot on the horizon, a point or two off the starboard bow, as if
-the edge of heaven had been salt-splashed by a turbulent wave. Excited
-dispute arose in the throng that quickly mustered at the rail.  All but
-the nautical-eyed saw only a cloud, which in a twinkling the hysterical
-had pronounced the forerunner of a howling tempest that was soon to
-bring to the _Prinzessin_ the dreaded _mal di mare_, perhaps even
-ununctioned destruction. One quaking father drove his family below and
-barricaded his corner against the tornado-lashed night to come.
-
-An hour brought reassurance, however, and with it jubilation as the
-outpost of the eastern world took on corporate form.  Before sunset we
-were abreast the island.  An oblong hillside sloped upward to a
-cloud-cowled peak.  Villages rambled away up tortuous valleys; here and
-there the green was dotted with chalk-white houses and whiter churches.
-Higher still the island was mottled with duodecimo fields of grain, each
-maturing in its own season; while far and near brilliant red windmills,
-less stolid and thick-set than those of Holland, toiled in the breeze,
-not hurriedly but with a deliberate vivacity befitting the Latin south.
-Most striking of all was a scent of profoundest peace that came even to
-the passing ship, and a suggestion of eternal summer, not of burning
-days and sultry nights, but of early June in some fairy realm utterly
-undisturbed by the clamorous rumble of the outer world.
-
-Two smaller islands appeared before the day was done, one to port so
-near that we could count the cottage windows and all but make out the
-features of skirt-blown peasant women standing firm-footed in deep green
-meadows against a background of dimming hills.  As the night descended,
-the houses faded to twinkling lights, now in clusters, now a
-stone's-throw one from another, but not once failing as long as we
-remained on deck.
-
-For two days following the horizon was unbroken. Then through the
-morning mists of June tenth rose Cabo San Vicente, the scowling granite
-corner-stone of Europe, every line of its time-scarred features a
-defiance to the sea and a menace to the passerby. Beyond stretched a
-wrinkled, verdureless plateau, to all appearances unpeopled, and falling
-into the Atlantic in grim, oxide-stained cliffs that here advanced
-within hailing distance, there retreated to the hazy horizon.  All
-through the day the world's commerce filed past,--water-logged tramps
-crawling along the face of the land, whale-like oil tanks showing only a
-dorsal fin of funnel and deck-house, East Indiamen straining Biscayward,
-and all the smaller fry of fishermen and coasters.  A rumor, rising no
-one knew where, promised that early morning should find us entering the
-Mediterranean.  I subsidized the services of a fellow-voyager dexterous
-with shears and razor and, reduced to a tuft of forelock, descended once
-more to the lower dungeon.
-
-Long before daylight I was awakened by the _commissario_, or steerage
-steward, tugging at a leg of my trousers and screeching in his boyish
-falsetto, "Gibiltèrra!  Make ready!  Gibiltèrra!"  It was no part of the
-commissario's duties to call third-class passengers.  But ever since the
-day he had examined my ticket, the little whisp of a man who never
-ceased to regard me with suspicion, as if he doubted the sanity of a
-traveler who was bound for a land that was neither Italy nor America.
-Of late he seemed convinced that my professed plan was merely a ruse to
-reach Naples without paying full fare, and he eyed me askance now as I
-clambered from my bunk, in his pigwidgeon face a stern determination
-that my knavery should not succeed.
-
-Supplied with a bucket by a sailor, I climbed on deck and approached the
-galley.  The cook was snoring in a corner of his domain; his understudy
-was nowhere to be seen.  I tip-toed to the hot-water faucet and was soon
-below again stripping off my "ship's clothes," which the obliging
-seaman, having bespoken this reward, caught up one by one as they fell.
-The splashing of water aroused the encircling sleepers.  Gradually they
-slid to the deck and gathered around me, inquiring the details of my
-eccentric plan.  By the time I was dressed in the best my suitcase
-offered, every mortal in the "single" quarters had come at least once to
-bid me a dubious farewell.
-
-The commissario returned and led the way in silence along the deserted
-promenade to the deck abaft the cabins.  The _Prinzessin_ lay at anchor.
-A half-mile away, across a placid lagoon, towered the haggard Rock of
-Gibraltar, a stone-faced city strewn along its base.  About the harbor,
-glinting in the slanting sunlight, prowled rowboats, sloops, and yawls,
-and sharp-nosed launches.  One of the latter soon swung in against the
-starboard ladder and there stepped on deck two men in white uniforms,
-who seated themselves without a word at a table which the commissario
-produced by some magic of his own, and fell to spreading out impressive
-documents.  A glance sufficed to recognize them Englishmen.  At length
-the older raised his head with an interrogatory jerk, and the
-commissario, with the air of a man taken red-handed in some rascality,
-minced forward and laid on the table a great legal blank with one line
-scrawled across it.
-
-"T 'ird classy maneefesto, signori," he apologized.
-
-"Eh!" cried the Englishman.  "A steerage passenger for Gibraltar?"
-
-The steward jerked his head backward toward me.
-
-"Humph!" said the spokesman, inspecting me from crown to toe.  "Where do
-you hail from?"
-
-Before I could reply there swarmed down the companionway a host of cabin
-passengers, in port-of-call array, whom the Englishman greeted with
-bared head and his broadest welcome-to-our-city smile; then bowed to the
-launch ladder.  As he resumed his chair I laid my passport before him.
-
-"For what purpose do you desire to land in Gibraltar?" he demanded.
-
-"I am bound for Spain--" I began.
-
-"Spain!" shouted the Briton, with such emphasis as if that land lay at
-the far ends of the earth. "Indeed!  Where are you going from Gibraltar,
-and how soon?"
-
-"Until I get ashore I can hardly say; in a day or so, at least; to
-Granada, perhaps, or Málaga."
-
-"Out of respect for the American passport," replied the Englishman
-grandiloquently, "I am going to let you land.  But see you stick to this
-story."
-
-I descended to the launch and ten minutes later landed with my haughty
-fellow-tourists at a bawling, tout-lined wharf.  An officer peeped into
-my handbag, and I sauntered on through a fortress gate under which a
-sun-scorched Tommy Atkins marched unremittingly to and fro.  Beyond,
-opened a narrow street, paralleling the harbor front and peopled even at
-this early hour with a mingling of races that gave to the scene the
-aspect of a temperate India, or a scoured and rebuilt Egypt.  Sturdy
-British troopers in snug khaki and roof-like tropical helmets strode
-past; bare-legged Moors in flowing _bournous_ stalked by in the widening
-streak of sunshine along the western walls; the tinkle of goat-bells
-mingled with the rhythmic cries of their drivers, offering a cup
-fresh-drawn to whomever possessed a copper; now an orange woman hobbled
-by, chanting her wares; everywhere flitted swarthy little men in misfit
-rags, with small baskets of immense strawberries which sold for a song
-to all but the tourists who tailed out behind me.
-
-Suddenly, a furlong beyond the gate, a signboard flashed down upon me,
-and I turned instinctively in at the open door of the "Seaman's
-Institute."  I found myself in a sort of restaurant, with here and there
-a pair of England's soldiers at table, and a towsled youth of darker
-tint hanging over the bar.  I commanded ham and eggs; when they were
-served the youth dropped into the chair opposite and, leaning on his
-elbows, smiled speechlessly upon me, as if the sight of an unfamiliar
-face brought him extraordinary pleasure.
-
-"Room to put me up?" I asked.
-
-"Nothin' much else but room," sighed the youth, in the slurring speech
-of the Anglo-Spanish half-cast, "but the super 's not up yet, an' I 'm
-only the skittles."
-
-I left my baggage in his keeping and, roaming on through the rapidly
-warming city to the Alameda Gardens, clambered away the day on the
-blistered face of the great Rock above.
-
-The "super," a flabby-muscled tank of an Englishman, was lolling out the
-evening among his clients when I reëntered the Institute.  My request
-for lodging roused him but momentarily from his lethargy.
-
-"Sign off here?" he drawled.
-
-"Left the _Prinzessin_ this morning," I answered, suddenly reminded that
-I was no longer a seaman prepared to produce my discharge-book on
-demand.
-
-"A.B., eh?"
-
-"Been before the mast on the _Warwickshire_, _Glen_--"
-
-"All right.  A bob a night is our tax.  But no smoking aloft," he added,
-as I dropped a coin on the table before him.
-
-"'Ow ye like Gib?" asked the half-cast, leading the way up a narrow
-stairway.
-
-"Like it," I replied.
-
-"Yes, they all does," he mourned, "for one day. But 'ow if you 'ad
-always to bask on the stewin' old Rock, like a bally lizard?  Saint
-Patrick!  If only some toff 'ud pay me a ticket to America!"
-
-He entered a great room, divided by thin wooden partitions into a score
-of small ones, and, tramping down a hallway, lighted me into the last
-chamber. Opposite the cot was a tall window with heavy wooden blinds.  I
-flung them open and leaned out over the _reja_; and all at once,
-unheralded, the Spain of my dreams leaped into reality.  Below, to one
-side, flowed the murmuring stream of Gibraltar's main thoroughfare;
-further away the flat-roofed city descended in moonlit indistinctness
-into the Mediterranean.  From a high-walled garden a pebble-toss away
-and canopied with fragrant fruit-trees, rose the twang of a guitar and a
-man's clear voice singing a languorous air of Andalusia.  Now and again
-a peal of laughter broke on the night and drifted away on the wings of
-the indolent sea-breeze. I rolled a cigarette and lighted it pensively,
-not in contempt for the "super's" orders, but because some transgression
-of established law seemed the only fitting celebration of the
-untrammeled summer that was opening before me.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER II
-
-                         FOOTPATHS OF ANDALUSIA
-
-
-Gibraltar rises early.  Proof of the assertion may be lacking, but
-certainly not even a "Rock lizard" could recompose himself for another
-nap after the passing of the crashing military band that snatched me at
-daybreak back to the waking world.  With one bound I sprang from cot to
-window.  But there was no ground for alarm; in gorge-like Waterport
-street below, Thomas Atkins, a regiment strong, was marching briskly
-barrackward, sweeping the flotsam of civilian life into the nooks and
-crannies of the flanking buildings.
-
-According to the Hoyle of travelers a glimpse of Morocco was next in
-order.  But with the absurdity of things inanimate and Oriental both the
-Tangiers steamers were scheduled to loll out the day in harbor. When
-"Skittles" had again stowed away my chattels, I drifted aimlessly out
-into the city.  But the old eagerness to tread Spanish soil was soon
-upon me, heightened now by the sight of Algeciras gleaming across the
-bay.  The harbor steamer would have landed me there a mere peseta
-poorer.  Instead, I sauntered through the Landport gate and away along
-the shifting highway which the Holder of the Rock has dubbed, in his
-insular tongue, the "Road to Spain."
-
-It led me past the double rank of sentry boxes between which soldiers of
-England tramp everlastingly, and into bandit-famed La Linea.  A Spaniard
-in rumpled uniform scowled out upon me from the first stone hovel, but,
-finding me empty-handed, as silently withdrew.  I turned westward
-through the disjointed town and out upon the curving shore of the bay.
-
-Here was neither highway nor path.  Indeed, were each Spanish minute
-tagged with a Broadway price-mark, the peseta would have been dearly
-saved, for the apparent proximity of Algeciras had been but a tricking
-of the eye.  Hour after hour I waded on through seashore sand, halting
-now and then in the shadow of some time-gnawed watch-tower of the
-departed Moor, before me such a survey of the shimmering sea to the very
-base of the hazy African coast as amply to justify the setting of an
-outlook on this jutting headland.
-
-The modern guardian of the coast dwells more lowly.  Every here and
-there I came upon a bleached and tattered grass hut just out of reach of
-the languid surf, and under it a no less ragged and listless
-_carabinero_ squatted in Arabic pose and tranquillity, musket within
-reach, or frankly and audibly asleep on his back in the sand.  Yet his
-station, too, was wisely chosen.  The watch and ward of to-day is set
-for no war-trimmed galley from the rival continent, but against petty
-smugglers skulking along the rim of the bay.  Nor could the guard better
-spend his day than asleep: his work falls at night.
-
-It was the hour of _siesta_ when I shuffled up a sandy bank into
-Algeciras.  Except for a cur or two that slunk with wilted tail across
-the plaza, the town lay in sultry repose.  I sat down in a shaded corner
-of the square.  Above me nodded the aged city tower, housing the
-far-famed and often-cursed bell of Algeciras.  Recently, which is to say
-some time during the past century, it was cracked from rim to crown; and
-the city fathers have not yet taken up the question of its replacement.
-Meanwhile, it continues afflictingly faithful to its task.  At
-quarter-hourly intervals it clanked out across the bay like the
-suspended hull of a battleship beaten with the butt of a cannon, a
-languid sigh rose over the drowsing city, and silence settled down anew.
-
-As the shadows spread, life revived, slowly and yawningly at first, then
-swelling to a contrasting merry-making that reached its climax toward
-midnight in the festooned streets beyond the plaza. Algeciras was
-celebrating her annual _feria_. Somewhere I fell in with a carpenter in
-blouse and hemp sandals, whose Spanish flowed musically as a woodland
-brook, and together we sauntered out the evening among the lighted
-booths.  The amusement mongers were toiling lustily.  Gypsy and clown,
-_bolerina_, juggler, and ballad-singer drew each his little knot of
-idlers, but a multitude was massed only around the gambling tables.
-Here a hubbub of excited voices assailed the ear; an incessant rain of
-coins fell on the green cloth, from the ragged and the tailored, from
-quavering crones and little children.  The carpenter dived into the fray
-with his only peseta, screaming with excitement as the wheel stopped on
-the number he had played.  Within an hour a pocket of his blouse was
-bulging with silver. I caught him by the sleeve and shouted a word in
-his ear.  Wild horses could not have dragged him away, nor the voices of
-sirens have distracted his eyes from the spinning trundle.  A half-hour
-later he did not possess a copper.
-
-"If you had listened," I said, when we had reached a conversational
-distance, "you would not have lost your fortune."
-
-"What fortune!" he panted.  "All I have lost, señor, is one peseta, and
-had an evening of a lifetime."
-
-I caught the morning steamer to Gibraltar and an hour later was pitching
-across the neck of the Mediterranean on board the _Gebel Dersa_.
-Third-class fare to Africa was one peseta; first-class, ten; and the
-difference in accommodation about forty feet,--to wit, the distance from
-the forward to the afterdeck. One peseta, indeed, seemed to be the fixed
-charge for any service in this corner of the world. My evening meal, the
-night's lodging, the boatman's fee for setting me aboard the steamer had
-each cost as much.  It would be as easy to quote a fixed selling-price
-for mining-stocks as to set the value of that delusive Spanish coin.
-The summer's average, however, was close upon sixteen cents for the
-peseta, of which the _céntimo_ is the hundredth part.  There are at
-large, be it further noted, a vast number of home-made pesetas worth
-just sixteen cents less, which show great affinity for the stranger's
-pocket until such time as he learns to emulate the native and sound each
-coin on the stone set into every counter.
-
-It was while we were skirting the calcined town of Tarifa that I made
-the acquaintance of Aghmed Shat.  The introduction was not of my
-seeking--but of the ingratiating ways of Aghmed I need say nothing,
-known as he is by every resident of our land.  At least I can recall no
-fellow-countryman whose visiting-card he did not dig up from the abysmal
-confusion of his inner garments.
-
-To that host of admirers it will bring grief to learn that Aghmed was
-most unjustly treated aboard the _Gebel Dersa_ on that blistering
-thirteenth day of June.  Yet facts must be reported.  It chanced that
-the dozen Anglo-Saxons sprawled ungracefully about the after-deck
-composed, at such times as composure was possible, a single party.  As
-all the world knows, it is for no other purpose than to offer the
-protection of his name and learning to just such defenseless flocks that
-the high-born Moroccan gentleman in question has been journeying thrice
-weekly to the Rock these thirty years.  Yet the bellwether of the party,
-blind to his opportunity, had chosen as guide an ignorant, vile, ugly,
-utterly unprincipled rascal whose only motive was mercenary. True,
-Aghmed and the rascal were outwardly as alike as two bogus pesetas.  But
-surely any man worthy the title of personal conductor should be versed
-in the reading of character, or at least able to distinguish between
-genuine testimonials from the world's élite and a parcel of bald
-forgeries!  Worst of all, the leader, with that stiff-neckedness
-congenital to his race, had persisted in his error even after Aghmed had
-recounted in full detail the rascal's crimes.  Small wonder there was
-dejection in the face of the universally-recommended as he crossed the
-pitching plank that connected the first-class with the baser world, his
-skirts threshing in the wind, his turban awry.
-
-At sight of me, however, he brightened visibly. With outstretched hand
-and a wan smile he minuetted forward and seated himself on the hatch
-beside me with the unobtrusive greeting:
-
-"Why for you travel third-class?"
-
-The question struck me as superfluous.  But it is as impossible to scowl
-down Aghmed's spirit of investigation as to stare him into believing an
-American a Spaniard.  By the time the valleys of the African coast had
-begun to take on individuality, I had heard not only the full story of
-his benevolent life but had refused for the twentieth time his
-disinterested offer of protection.  Nature, however, made Aghmed a
-guardian of his fellow-man, as she has made other hapless mortals poets;
-and her commands must be carried out at whatever sacrifice.  Gradually,
-slowly, sadly, the "souvenir" which "americano gentlemen" were
-accustomed to bestow upon him with their farewell hand-clasp fell from
-twenty shillings to ten, to five, to three, then to as many pesetas. It
-was useless to explain that I had trusted to my own guidance in many an
-Arab land, and been fully satisfied with the service.  When every other
-argument had fallen lifeless at his slippered feet, he sent forth at
-regular intervals the sole survivor, cheering it on with a cloud of
-acrid cigarette smoke:
-
-"Si el señor"--for his hamstrung English had not far endured the
-journey--"if the gentleman has never taken a guide, this will be a new
-experience."
-
-In the end the sole survivor won.  What, after all, is travel but a
-seeking after new experience?  Here, in truth, was one; and I might find
-out for myself whether a full-grown man tagging through the streets of a
-foreign city on the heels of a twaddle-spouting native feels as
-ridiculous as he looks.
-
-We anchored toward noon in the churning harbor of Tangiers and were soon
-pitched into the pandemonium of all that goes to make up an Oriental mob
-lying in wait for touring Europeans.  In a twinkling, Aghmed had engaged
-donkeys to carry us to the principal hotel.  I paused on the outskirts
-of the riot to inform him that our sight-seeing would be afoot; and with
-a scream of astonishment he reeled and would, perhaps, have fallen had
-not the street been paved in that which would have made such
-stage-business unpleasant.
-
-"Pero, señor!" he gasped.  "You do not--you--why, people will say you
-have no money!"
-
-"Horrible!" I cried, dodging a slaughtered sheep on the head of a black
-urchin in scanty night-shirt that dashed suddenly out of a slit between
-two buildings.  Aghmed, myopic with excitement, failed to side-step, and
-it was some distance beyond that his wail again fell on my ear:
-
-"O señor!  Americano gentlemen never go by this street.  I cannot guide
-without donkeys--"
-
-"You can perhaps run along home to dinner?" I suggested; but he merely
-fell silent and pattered on at my heels, now and again heaving a
-plaintive sigh.
-
-For the better part of the day we roamed in and out through the tangled
-city.  In the confusion of donkeys, bare legs, and immodesty, the
-narcotic smell of hashish, the sound of the harsh guttural tongue once
-so familiar, memories of more distant Mohammedan lands surged upon me.
-Yet by comparison Tangiers seemed only a faded segment of the swarming
-Arab world set aside to overawe European tourists, Arabic enough in its
-way, but only a little, mild-mannered sample.
-
-Late in the afternoon I rounded the beach and, falling upon the highway
-to Fez, strolled away out of sight and sound of the seaport.  Aghmed
-still languished at my heels.  To him also the day had brought a new
-experience.  As we leaned back against a grassy slope to watch the
-setting of the red sun, he broke a long hour's silence.
-
-"Señor," he said, "never have I walked so much. When we had come to the
-Socco I was tired.  When we had seen all the city my legs were as two
-stone pillars.  Yet I must keep walking."
-
-"Why?" I asked.
-
-"Because you must be protected!  Ah, señor, you do not know how
-dangerous is Tangiers; and here in the country alone you would before
-now be dead, or carried off by bandits.  Perhaps this much walking will
-make me sick.  Or if I have been seen by my friends or a gentleman
-tourist!  Allah meskeen! They will say I am no longer a gentleman guide,
-but a donkey boy."
-
-When her night traffic had taken on its wonted swing, my stone-legged
-protector called at the inn for the purpose of proving that the
-far-famed naughtiness of his city was no mere conceit.  The
-demonstration was not convincing.  Two hours or more we ambled from
-wineshop to _café cantante_, enduring a deal of caterwauling and inane
-vulgarity by no means superior to a Friday-night performance on the
-Bowery.  The relieving shepherd's crook, moreover, being nowhere in
-evidence, I fled the torture and retired to bed.
-
-To my infinite relief, Aghmed was on hand in full health next morning to
-bid me farewell at the end of the pier and to receive his specified
-"souvenir."  He was profuse, too, with the hope that I might soon
-revisit his land; but I caught no hint of a desire to add my card to his
-collection.
-
-The steamer plowed her way back to Europe, and by mid-afternoon I
-emerged from the Sailor's Institute face to face with a serious problem.
-The most patient of men, which I am not, would hardly set off on a tramp
-across the Iberian peninsula carrying a forty-pound suitcase, even of
-unread classics.  To have dumped the books in the first alleyway would
-have been easy, yet painful, for there runs a strain of Scotch in my
-veins.  I dropped in on the nearest bookseller to inquire whether he
-could see his way clear to accept at a bargain a batch of novels newly
-imported from New York.  But the eager glow quickly faded from his
-features as I laid the volumes before him.
-
-"Why, sir!" he cried.  "These be _old_ books, out of date.  I thought
-had you something New York is reading this summer--"
-
-In which attitude his two rivals also dismissed me, even though I sought
-the good will of the last by squandering the bulk of a bright gold
-sovereign for Baedeker's "Spain."  As I turned down to the harbor, a
-thought, or more exactly the sight of a sergeant's uniform under the
-fortress gate, struck me. The wearer stiffened like a ramrod when I
-halted before him.
-
-"Have you a library in the barracks?"
-
-"Ah--certainly, garrison library.  But I hardly fawncy the commander
-would allow--"
-
-"Of course not," I interrupted, tossing the books into his arms; "but I
-am off for Spain and if you have any use for a few novels--"
-
-"Ah--er--well, thank you most kindly, sir!" bawled the officer after me.
-
-Though the fact may never be called to his attention, the sergeant had
-heard the last phrase of English that passed my lips in many a week.  As
-a personal experiment I had resolved not to speak a word of my native
-tongue within the kingdom of Spain, even to myself; though this latter
-proviso, to be sure, necessitated the early acquisition of a few Spanish
-terms of double voltage.
-
-The forerunner of evening was descending upon Algeciras as I mounted
-through her now all but voiceless fiesta and struck away over a
-grass-patched hillock.  The further slope was skirted by a dusty highway
-that wound off through a billowy country pregnant with the promise of
-greater heights to come.  But the trend of the road was west rather than
-north.  Over the hills ahead two male voices were bawling a sort of
-dialogue of song.  I mended my pace and had soon overtaken two peasants
-rollicking homeward from the festival.  When I inquired if this were the
-highway to Madrid they fell suddenly silent, after a word of greeting,
-and strode along beside me exchanging puzzled glances.
-
-"Well, then, to Honda, señores?" I asked.  "Poresta carretera?"
-
-"No, no, señor!" they answered quickly.  "Por aquí no!  You must go on
-the railroad."
-
-"No, I am traveling on foot."
-
-"Perfectamente, señor; and to walk to Honda you must take the railroad."
-
-There was nothing in the mien of either to suggest the practical joker.
-Yet so far as my experience carried there was not a corner of Europe
-where two steps on the right of way was rated less a crime than arson or
-housebreaking.
-
-We reached the line not far beyond, the highway diving under by a
-stone-faced cutting and bearing the peasants away with it.  Over the
-next rise their dove-tailed duet rang out again and, melting in volume
-and rendered almost musical by distance, filtered back to me from the
-deepening valleys a full quarter-hour longer.
-
-I climbed the embankment not without misgiving. Sure enough, a track
-there was, beside the broad-gauge rails, covered with cinders and
-scarred with many imprints of donkey hoofs.  A mile along it
-demonstrated how poor a walking kit is even a half-empty suitcase.  I
-sat down to take stock of the contents.  In the jumble was a blue
-flannel shirt past its prime.  I fished out thread and needle and sewed
-a Jack-Tar seam across the garment below the armpits, amputated sleeves
-and shoulders with a few, slashes, and behold! a knapsack that might
-bear my burdens through all the kingdom of Spain, and hold its own in
-any gathering of shoulder-packed wayfarers.  When I had stuffed my
-possessions into it there was still room to spare for such odds and ends
-as find their way into the baggage of the least acquisitive of
-travelers.  Then pitching the suitcase spread-eagle over the bordering
-hedge, I cut a stick in a neighboring thicket and struck off again at
-the regular stride so indispensable to any true enjoyment of tramping.
-
-Night fell soon after.  A fall it was indeed; no half-hearted settling
-down of gloom as in our northern zone, but a descendant flood of
-obscurity that left the eyes blinking in dismay.  To right and left,
-where had been rolling uplands and heathered fields sharp-cut in
-smallest detail, nothing--a sea of inky blackness; and ahead, the
-stony-blind unknown. The cinder path held firm, but only a foot rubbing
-along the rail guided my steps, until such time as sight resumed its
-leadership.
-
-An hour or more I marched on into the summer night.  Then out of the
-darkness ahead stole a feeble point of light, an increasing murmur of
-human voices, and the end of the first day's tramp was before me.
-Beside the way a stone building stood open, an oil torch twilighting a
-cobble-floored room heaped at one end with a Spanish grocer's wares.  An
-unshaven man of fifty, a red handkerchief bound brigand-fashion about
-his head, bulked forward through an inner doorway.
-
-"You furnish lodgings?"
-
-"Sí, señor; and your burro?"
-
-"I am walking.  Is supper to be had?"
-
-"Claro, hombre!  Choose from the baskets and the señora shall cook it
-for you in a twinkling."
-
-All through the following day the path continued parasitic to the
-railway.  The roadbed was thickly covered with crushed stone, with
-nowhere a hint of the existence of section-gangs.  On either hand rolled
-away a landscape stamped with the features of an African ancestry, all
-but concealed at times by the cactus-trees of a willow's height that
-hedged the track.  At rare intervals a stuccoed station serving some
-hamlet hidden among the hills found standing-room on the right of way.
-An occasional hovel built of field stones frowned down from the crest of
-a parched hillock.  Now and again out of the meeting-place of the rails
-ahead came jogging a peasant seated sidewise on an ass, to swerve
-suddenly aside and rattle off down a rocky gorge, singing a high-pitched
-ballad of Arabic cadence.  But these were but bubbles on the surface of
-a fathomless solitude, though a solitude brilliant with an all-invading
-sunshine that left no skulking-place for somber moods.
-
-It turned out that the railroad had not been built for the exclusive
-convenience of pedestrians and donkeys.  A bit before noon a rumbling
-arose out of the north, and no unconscionable time thereafter the daily
-"expreso" roared by--at a rate close upon fifteen miles an hour.  The
-ticket collector, cigarette in mouth, clambered hand over hand along the
-running board, in imminent peril of losing his footing--and being
-obliged to pursue his train to the next station.  During the afternoon
-there passed two "mixtos," toy freight trains with a caudal carload of
-passengers.  But the speed of these was more reasonable, varying from
-six to eight miles, with vacations at each station and frequent holidays
-in the open country.
-
-The sun was still an hour high when I reached the station of San Pablo.
-This time the town itself stood in plain sight, pitched on the summit of
-an oak-grown hill barely a mile from the line.  I plunged quickly down
-into the intervening valley.
-
-It was a checker-board place, perhaps only a century or two old;
-certainly no relic of the Moor, for there was not a sign of shop or
-market in all its extent.  Only in the last street did I catch sight of
-one of its inhabitants, dining in solitary state in the center of a bare
-room.  He stared at me a long moment when I halted before the immense
-open window to inquire for an inn.
-
-"San Pablo, señor," he answered at last, "is a private town owned by the
-mining company.  There is no inn."
-
-I was turning away when he continued:
-
-"But step inside and we shall see what the ama can arrange for you."
-
-He was, as I had guessed, a Frenchman, an expert employed in the mines.
-The Spanish, however, in which he addressed the _ama_ was faultless.
-
-"Ah, Don Victor!" protested that matron, "How can I give posada, having
-no license from the government?  And without the permission of Don
-José--"
-
-"Pepete," said the Gaul to an urchin peering in upon us, "ask Don José
-to have the goodness to step over.  He is manager of the mines," he
-continued, "and so alcalde and potentate of San Pablo."
-
-It would have been a misfortune, indeed, to have journeyed through
-Andalusia without making the acquaintance of Don José.  He burst in upon
-us a moment later; a very hippopotamus of a man, dressed in baggy
-trousers, slouch hat, and alpaca jacket.  Unfortunately his arrival
-coincided with my announcement that I was walking to Córdoba--the whole
-itinerary would have been too strong meat for Latin consumption--and his
-native geniality was for a time overshadowed by astonishment at my
-extraordinary means of locomotion.  I had all but finished the meal set
-for me in an adjoining room when the pair entered and sat down beside
-me.
-
-"Señor," began the manager, in what was meant to be a whisper, "you
-cannot walk to Córdoba.  It is forty leagues."
-
-"How much money have you?" put in the Frenchman.
-
-"Er--I have something over seven pesetas," I answered.
-
-"Bueno!  Bonísima!" cried the alcalde, patting me on the shoulder.  "Don
-Victor and I will add the rest and I shall go with you to the station to
-buy the ticket--in the morning."
-
-Great, I reflected, is the infant mortality among generous resolutions
-in the gray of dawn, and accordingly held my peace.
-
-Having settled my future to his own satisfaction, Don José linked an arm
-in one of mine and plunged out into the night.
-
-"Your bed is waiting for you in your own house," he said with Spanish
-formality.  "You have only to say the word."
-
-The first syllable of which I had not found time to say before we
-marched full front into San Pablo's barrack-like café.  A roar of
-greeting sounded through the dense cloud of cigarette smoke: "Buenas
-tardes!  Don José!"
-
-"Buenas, amigos!  Que le gusta!" returned my companion, and pushing
-toward a table with two vacant chairs he continued without a break, "Un
-ponche, Don Gregario!  And you, señor?  Anything you may choose, though
-there is nothing equal to ponche.  Verdad, Rufo?"  Then as I opened my
-lips to express a preference, "Sí! sí!  Don Gregario! Dos ponches!"
-
-The room was filled with a hundred bronze-tinted miners over wine and
-cards.  Don José was the industrial autocrat of every man present, yet
-one would have fancied him rather a brother or cousin, so free was the
-intercourse from haughtiness on the one hand and servility on the other.
-Miner and manager addressed each other by their given names, shouted at
-each other in friendly dispute, thumped each other fraternally on the
-back.  Despite all which one felt absolute assurance that when labor
-again caught up its pick the manager's word would command instant
-obedience.
-
-The landlord, flushed with the exertion of their concoction, soon set
-the incomparable beverages before us.  With the alacrity of a man who
-will have no shadow of debt hanging over his head, Don José thrust a
-hand into a pocket of his alpaca and cast on the table three mammoth
-coppers, the combined value of which was close upon five cents.  With
-the first sip he rolled a cigarette and pushed pouch and papers toward
-me.  Then having introduced me as "Señor Newyorkano," he plunged
-headlong into the story of my life, addressing not merely the assembled
-miners but whomever else may have been prowling within gunshot of the
-building.  "And to think, amigos," he concluded, "after crossing all the
-sea el señor should have wandered into San Pablo looking for a posada!"
-
-The company beat their hands on the tables and howled with merriment.
-Whatever the uproarious humor of that climax to my adventures, it lost
-nothing of its poignancy as long as the evening lasted, and served to
-top off a score of otherwise pointless tales.
-
-My ignorance of the Andalusian game notwithstanding, I had soon taken a
-hand.  The alcalde, consuming uncounted cigarettes, beamed over my
-shoulder shouting praise of my sagacity each time I cast on the table
-the card he pointed out.  As for "ponche," what the peerless libation
-lacked in favor with the masses it gained in the unswerving fidelity of
-its sponsor.  With clock-like regularity his reverberating voice rang
-out above the din of revelry: "Don Gregario, un ponche!"  In vain did I
-announce my thirst permanently abated, in vain did I "say the word" or
-strive at least to take advantage of the free choice offered me.  My
-protest was invariably drowned in the roar of the amended order: "Sí,
-sí! Dos ponches, Don Gregario!"
-
-Evening rolled into night, night into morning, and still the clank of
-copper coins continued.  Once I attempted to forestall the diving into
-that fathomless alpaca by thrusting a hand into my own pocket. My
-unquenchable host started to his feet with a bellow that seemed to set
-the very walls vibrating:
-
-"Strangers, señor, cannot spend money in San Pablo!  We are a private
-town!"
-
-The minute hand was nearing the completion of its third lap when a
-general uprising, subtly instigated by the landlord, swept the carousers
-into the coal-black night.  "My house" was no such regal mansion as
-befitted an industrial sovereign, an alcalde, and a man of unlimited
-coppers rolled into one.  It was different, to be sure, from the other
-bare stone dwellings of San Pablo, but only in the wild bachelor
-disorder that reigned within its four naked walls. In one corner was a
-mountainous husk mattress.  Its mate, alleged my host, lay somewhere
-buried in the jumble; and he verified the assertion not long after by
-dragging it forth.  While he was booting this into some resemblance to a
-bed, I kicked off my shoes and sank into profound slumber.
-
-Don José, too, awoke at sunrise.  His generosity, however, was but a
-shadow of its former self.  On the descent from the town he listened to
-my objections to the proposed charity without once proffering a reply.
-In the depth of the valley he halted and stared gloomily up at the
-steep, sun-glazed path to the station observing that Providence after
-all is the appointed guardian of the foolhardy.  I thrust out a hand.
-He shook it dejectedly and, bidding me go with God and remember there is
-no drink equal to ponche, set out to clamber his way back to the
-village.
-
-Beyond the curve that swept San Pablo into the past a stream brawled
-down out of the hills.  I climbed a little way up the gorge and came
-upon a tumbled boulder that had stored up a pool of just the depth for a
-morning plunge.  Further on the railway grew more winding with every
-mile.  The hills increased to mountain spurs, and soon after came the
-mountains themselves, the parched and rock-tumbled Sierra de Honda,
-fertile only with the memory of smugglers and intricate pathways.  The
-route led through many long, sombrous tunnels, entrance into which from
-the blazing sunshine was like the diving into a mountain lake.  Where
-the burrowings ended, the line became still more circuitous, leaping
-over abysmal, jagged gulleys by massive dry bridges.
-
-I fasted all the day; for it was Sunday, and the few station buildings
-that appeared were deserted. Yet the privation passed almost unnoticed.
-Were a choice to be made I would willingly sacrifice any day's dinner
-for the unfailing sunshine of Spain, reinforced by the pleasure of
-knowing that with the new dawn another unclouded day will begin.
-
-[Illustration: A Moorish gate of Ronda]
-
-My night's halt was beneath swaying palm-trees.
-
-Down through a ravine beside the track were scattered a few rambling
-houses, in one of which I found accommodations.  Its owner was a
-peasant, battered with years, who sat before his dwelling smoking in the
-cool of evening with his three sons.  One of these was a _guardia civil_
-who had seen all the provinces of Spain, and whose language in
-consequence was Spanish.  His brothers, on the other hand, spoke the
-crabbed dialect of Andalusia.  I caught the sense of most of their
-remarks only at the third or forth repetition, to their ever-increasing
-astonishment.
-
-[Illustration: A gitana of Granada.  In the district of the Alhambra.]
-
-"Hermano," interrupted the guardia once, "you know you do not speak
-Spanish?"
-
-The speaker fell silent and listened for some time open-mouthed to his
-brother in uniform.
-
-"Caracoles!" he cried suddenly.  "I speak no other tongue than you,
-brother, except for the fine words you have picked up at las Cortes!"
-
-Which was exactly the difficulty.  The "fine" words were of pure
-Castilian, for which the rural andaluz substitutes terms left behind by
-the Moor. Furthermore his speech is guttural, explosive, slovenly, more
-redolent of Arabic than of Spanish.  He is particularly prone to slight
-the S.  His version of "estes señores" is "ete señore."  Which is
-comprehensible; but how shall the stranger guess that "cotóa e' l'
-jutí'a" is meant to convey the information that "la justicia es
-costosa?"
-
-My evening meal consisted of a _gazpacho_, olives, eggs, cherries,
-blood-dripping pomegranates, a rich brown bread, and wine; my couch of a
-straw mattress in a corner of the great kitchen--and my reckoning was
-barely twelve cents.
-
-Afoot with the dawn, I had soon entered the vast cork forest that covers
-all the northern slope of the sierra.  Wherever a siding offered, stood
-long rows of open freight cars piled high with bales of the spongy bark;
-the morning "mixto" hobbled by bearing southward material seemingly
-sufficient to stop all the bottles in Christendom.
-
-By rail Ronda was still a long day distant--but not afoot.  Before the
-morning was old I came upon the beginning of the short-cut which my
-hosts of the night had described.  It straggled uncertainly upward for a
-time across a rolling sandy country knobbed with tufts of withered grass
-and overspread with mammoth cork-trees, some still unbarked, some
-standing stark naked in the blistering sun.  Then all at once, path,
-sand and vegetation ceased, and above me stretched to the very heavens
-the grilling face of a bare rock.  I mounted zigzagging, as up the slate
-roof of some gigantic church, swathed in a heat that burned through the
-very soles of my shoes.  A mile up, two guardias civiles emerged
-suddenly from a fissure, the sun glinting on their muskets and polished
-black three-cornered hats.  Here, then, of all places, was to be my
-first meeting with these officious fellows, whose inquisitiveness was
-reported the chief drawback to a tramp in Spain.  But they greeted me
-with truly Spanish politeness, even cordiality. Only casually, when we
-had chatted a bit, as is wont among travelers meeting on the road, did
-one of them suggest:
-
-"You carry, no doubt, señor, your personal papers?"
-
-I dived into my shirt--my knapsack, and drew out my passport.  The
-officers admired it a moment side by side without making so bold as to
-touch it, thanked me for privilege, raised a forefinger to their hats,
-and stalked on down the broiling rock.
-
-A full hour higher I brought up against a sheer precipice.  Of the town
-that must be near there was still not a trace.  For some time longer I
-marched along the foot of the cliff, swinging half round a circle and
-always mounting.  Then all at once the impregnable wall gave way, a
-hundred white stone houses burst simultaneously on my sight, and I
-entered a city seething in the heat of noonday.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER III
-
-                     THE LAST FOOTHOLD OF THE MOOR
-
-
-Ronda crouches on the bald summit of a rock so mighty that one can
-easily fancy it the broken base of some pillar that once upheld the sky.
-Nature seems here to have established division of labor.  The gigantic
-rock bearing aloft the city sustains of itself not a sprig of
-vegetation. Below, so far below that Ronda dares even in summer to fling
-down unburied the mutilated carcasses from her bullring, spreads the
-encircling _vega_, producing liberally for the multitude above, but
-granting foothold scarcely to a peasant's hovel.  Beyond and round about
-stretches the sierra, having for its task to shelter the city against
-prowling storms and to enrich the souls of her inhabitants with its
-rugged grandeur.
-
-Travelers come to Ronda chiefly to gaze elsewhere. As an outlook upon
-the world she is well worth the coming; as a city she is almost
-monotonous, with her squat, white-washed houses sweltering in the
-omnivorous sunshine.  Her only "sight" is the _Tajo_, the "gash" in the
-living rock like the mark of some powerful woodman's ax in the top of a
-tree-stump. A stork-legged bridge spans it, linking two unequal sections
-of the town, which without this must be utter strangers.  A stream
-trickles along its bottom, how deep down one recognizes only when he has
-noted how like toy buildings are the grist-mills that squat beside it
-pilfering their power.
-
-Elsewhere within the town the eyes wander away to the enclosing
-mountains.  The wonder is not that her inhabitants are dreamy-eyed;
-rather that they succeed at intervals in shaking off the spell of
-nature's setting to play their rôles in life's prosaic drama.  As for
-myself, I rambled through her piping streets for half the afternoon
-because she is Spanish, and because my supply of currency was falling
-low.  Ronda boasts no bank.  Her chief dry-goods merchant, however--by
-what right my informant could not guess--boasts himself a banker. I
-found the amateur financier at home, which chanced to be distant the
-height of one short stairway from his place of business.  When I had
-chatted an hour or two with his clerks, the good man himself appeared,
-rosy with the exertions of the siesta, and examined the ten-dollar check
-with many expressions of gratitude for the opportunity.
-
-"We shall take pleasure," he said, "in liquidating this obligation.  You
-will, of course, bring persons of my acquaintance to establish your
-identity, como es costumbre in large financial transactions?"
-
-I had never so fully realized how convincing was my command of Spanish
-as when I had succeeded within an hour in convincing this bond-slave of
-"costumbre" that express-checks are designed to avoid just this
-difficulty.  He expressed a desire to examine the document more
-thoroughly and retired with it to the depths of his establishment.
-Toward evening he returned with pen and ink-horn.
-
-"I accept the obligation," he announced, "and shall pay you fifty-seven
-pesetas, according to yesterday's quotation on the Borsa.  But I find I
-have such a sum on hand only in coppers."
-
-"Which would weigh," I murmured, after the necessary calculation,
-"something over thirty pounds.  You will permit me, señor, to express my
-deep gratitude--and to worry along for the time being with the money in
-pocket."
-
-Travelers who arraign Honda for lack of creature comforts can never have
-been assigned the quarters a peseta won me for the night in the "Parador
-de Vista Hermosa."  The room was a house in itself, peculiarly clean and
-home-like, and furnished not only with the necessities of bed, chairs,
-and taper-lighted effigy of the Virgin, but with table, washstand, and
-even a bar of soap, the first I had seen in the land except that in my
-own knapsack.  When the sun had fallen powerless behind the sierra, I
-drew the green reed shade and found before my window a little _rejaed_
-balcony hanging so directly over the Tajo that the butt of a cigarette
-fell whirling down, down to the very bottom of the gorge. I dragged a
-chair out into the dusk and sat smoking beneath the star-sprinkled sky
-long past a pedestrian's bedtime, the unbroken music of the Guadalvin
-far below ascending to mingle with the murmur of the strolling city.
-
-To the north of Ronda begins a highway that goes down through a country
-as arid and rock-strewn as the anti-Lebanon.  Here, too, is much of the
-Arab's contempt for roads.  Donkeys bearing singing men tripped by along
-hard-beaten paths just far enough off the public way to be no part of
-it. Now and again donkey and trail rambled away independently over the
-thirsty hills, perhaps to return an hour beyond, more often to be
-swallowed up in the unknown.  The untraveled carretera lay inches deep
-in fine white dust.  Far and near the landscape was touched only with a
-few slight patches of viridity.  The solitary tree under which I tossed
-through an hour of siesta cast the stringy, wavering shade of a
-bean-pole.
-
-Sharp-eyed with appetite, I came near, nevertheless, to passing unseen
-early in the afternoon a village hidden in plain sight along the flank
-of a reddish, barren hill.  In this, too, Andalusia resembles Asia
-Minor; her hamlets are so often of the same colored or colorless rocks
-as the hills on which they are built as frequently to escape the eye.  I
-forded a bone-dry brook and climbed into the tumbled _pueblo_.  Toward
-the end of the principal lack of a street one of the crumbling
-hovel-fronts was scrawled in faded red, with the Spaniard's innocent
-indistinction between the second and twenty-second letters of the
-alphabet:
-
-[Illustration: Aqui se bende bino]
-
-Once admitted to the sleepy interior, I regaled myself on bread, cheese,
-and "bino" and scrambled back to the highway.  It wandered more and more
-erratically, slinking often around hills that a bit of exertion would
-have surmounted.  I recalled the independence of the donkeys and,
-picking up a path at an elbow of the route, struck off across the rugged
-country.
-
-But there is sound truth, as in all his venerable if somewhat
-baggy-kneed proverbs, in the Spaniard's assertion that "no hay atajo sin
-trabajo."  In this short-cut there was work and to spare.  As long as
-the day lasted the way continued stiff and stony, ceaselessly mounting
-or descending, with never a level of breathing-space breadth nor a
-moment's respite from the rampant sunshine.  A few times I stumbled upon
-an inhabited heap of stones in a fold of the hills.  Man, at least fully
-clothed, seemed never before to have strayed thus far afield.  From each
-hutch poured forth a shaggy fellow with his draggled mate and a flock of
-half-naked children, all to stare speechlessly after me as long as the
-crown of my hat remained in sight.
-
-The highway had deserted me entirely.  As darkness came on, the dimming
-outline of the cragged hills rising on either hand carried the thoughts
-more than ever back to the savage, Bedouin-skulking solitudes of Asia
-Minor.  Long after these, too, had blended into the night I stumbled on.
-At length there fell on my ear the distant dismal howling of dogs.  I
-pressed forward, and when the sound had grown to a discordant uproar
-plunged, stick in hand, into a chaos of buildings jumbled together on a
-rocky ridge,--the village of Peñarruria.
-
-The twisting, shoulder-broad channels between the predelugian hovels
-were strewn with cobblestones, no two of equal size or height, but all
-polished icy smooth.  I sprawled and skated among them, a prey to
-embarrassment for my clumsiness, until my confusion was suddenly
-dispelled by the pleasure of seeing a native fall down, a buxom girl of
-eighteen who suffered thus for her pride in putting on shoes. Throughout
-the town these were rare, and stockings more so.
-
-The _venta_ into which I straggled at last was the replica of an Arabic
-_khan_, as ancient as the days of Tarik.  It consisted of a covered
-barnyard court surrounded by a vast corridor, with rock arches and
-pillars, beneath which mules, _borricos_, and a horse or two were
-munching.  One archway near the entrance was given over to human
-occupation.  The _posadero_ grumbled at me a word of greeting; his wife
-snarled interminably over her pots and jars in preparing me a meager
-supper.  Now and again as I ate, an _arriero_ arrived and led his animal
-through the dining-room to the stable.  I steeled myself to endure a
-rough and stony night.
-
-When I had sipped the last of my wine, however, the hostess, sullen as
-ever, mounted three stone steps in the depth of the archway and lighted
-me into a room that was strikingly in contrast with the dungeon-like inn
-proper.  The chamber was neatly, even daintily furnished, the walls
-decorated college-fashion with pictures of every size and variety, the
-tile floor carpeted with a thick rug, the bed veiled with lace curtains.
-It was distinctly a feminine room; and as I undressed the certainty grew
-upon me that I had dispossessed for the night the daughter of the house,
-who had turned out to be none other than that maid whose pride-shod
-downfall had so relieved my embarrassment.  Evidently the venta of
-Peñarruria afforded no other accommodations befitting a guest who could
-squander more than a half peseta for a mere night's lodging.
-
-Over the head of the bed, framed in flowers and the dust-dry memento of
-Palm Sunday, was a chromo misrepresentation of the Virgin, beneath which
-flickered a wick floating in oil.  I was early trained to sleep in
-darkness.  When I had endured for a long half-hour the dancing of the
-light on my eyelids, I rose to blow it out, and sank quickly into
-slumber.
-
-I had all but finished my coffee and wedge of black bread next morning
-when a double shriek announced that my forgotten sacrilege had been
-discovered. The modern vestal virgins, in the persons of the posadera
-and her now barefoot daughter, charged fire-eyed out of my erstwhile
-quarters and swooped down upon me like two lineal descendants of the
-Grecian Furies.  I mustered such expression of innocence and
-fearlessness as I was able and listened in silence.  They exhausted in
-time their stock of blistering adjectives and dashed together into the
-street publishing their grievance to all Peñarruria. Gradually the
-shrill voices died away in the contorted village, and with them my
-apprehension of figuring in some modern auto da fé.  As I was picking up
-my knapsack, however, an urchin burst in upon me shouting that the
-guardia civil thereby summoned me into his presence.
-
-"Ha," thought I, "Spain has merely grown more up-to-date in dealing with
-heretics."
-
-The officer was not to be avoided.  He sat before a building which I
-must pass to escape from the town; a deep-eyed man who manipulated his
-cigarette with one hand while he slowly ran the fingers of the other
-through the only beard, perhaps, in all the dreaded company of which he
-was a member.  His greeting, however, was cordial, almost diffident.  In
-fact, the cause of my summons was quite other than I had apprehended.
-Having learned my nationality from the inn register, he had made so bold
-as to hope that I would delay my departure long enough to give him a
-cigarette's worth of information concerning the western hemisphere.
-
-"I have resigned from the guardia," he said in explanation of his
-un-Spanish curiosity, "and in three months I go to make cigars in your
-Tampa, in la Florida.  Spain can no longer feed her children."
-
-I sketched briefly the life in the new world, not forgetting to picture
-some of the hardships such a change must bring a man of the fixed habits
-of forty, and took leave of him with the national benediction.
-
-For some hours I trudged on across a country similar to that of the day
-before.  The heat was African.  The Spanish summer resembles an
-intermittent fever; with nightfall comes an inner assurance that the
-worst is over, and infallibly with the new day the blazing sun sends
-down its rays seemingly more fiercely than before.  The reflection of
-how agreeable would be a respite from its fury was weaving itself into
-my thoughts when I swooped suddenly down upon a railway at a hamlet
-named Gobantes.  I had no hope of covering all Spain afoot.  Away among
-the hills to the north the whistle of a locomotive that moment sounded.
-I turned aside to the station and bought a ticket to Málaga.
-
-The train squirmed away through howling, arid mountains, abounding in
-tunnels and tumbled bottomless gorges; then descending headlong to the
-plain, landed me at the seaport in mid-afternoon. Even Malaga on the
-seashore suffers from the heat. Her Alameda was thick in dust as an
-Andalusian highway; beneath the choking trees that bordered it the stone
-benches were blistering to the touch. The excursion was rewarded,
-however, if by nothing more than the mighty view of the sail-flecked
-Mediterranean from the summit of the Gibilfaro, reached by a dripping
-climb through shifting rubble and swarms of begging gypsy children.
-Africa was visible, dimly but unmistakably.  Below simmered the city,
-unenlivened by a single touch of green; to the right the vega stretched
-floor-level to the foot of the treeless Alhama.  Directly beneath me,
-like some vast tub, yawned the bullring, empty now but for a score of
-boys playing at "torero," flaunting their jackets in the face of an
-urchin fitted with paper horns, and dashing in pretended terror for the
-barrier when he turned upon them.  The ascent of the Gibilfaro must
-certainly be forbidden on Sunday afternoons.  From this height the
-struggle in the arena, visible in its entirety, yet purged by distance
-of its unpleasing details, would be a scene more impressive than from
-the best seat in the tribunes.
-
-When I reached the station next morning the platform gate was locked and
-the train I had hoped to take was legally departed.  A railway
-hanger-on, in rags and hemp sandals, however, climbed the iron picket
-fence and shouted a word to the engineer. Then beckoning to me to
-follow, he trotted back into the building and rapped authoritatively on
-the closed window of the ticket-office.
-
-"Señor," he said, as the agent looked out upon us, "be kind enough to
-sell this caballero a ticket."
-
-"The train is gone," answered the agent.
-
-"Not so, señor," replied the bundle of rags haughtily; "I am having it
-held that this cavalier may take it."
-
-"Ah, very well," responded the official; and having sold me the ticket,
-he handed to the hanger-on the key to the platform gate.  As I passed
-through it the latter held out his hand, into which I dropped a copper.
-
-"Muchísimas gracias, caballero," he said, bowing profoundly, "and may
-your grace forever travel with God."
-
-It was noon when I descended at Bobadilla, the sand-swept junction where
-all southern Spain changes cars.  The train to Granada was soon jolting
-away to the eastward.  Within the third-class compartment the heat was
-flesh-smelting.  The bare wooden cell, of the size of a piano-crate, was
-packed not merely to its lawful and unreasonable capacity of ten
-persons, but with all the personal chattels under which nine of those
-persons had been able to totter down to the station.  Between the two
-plank benches, that danced up and down so like the screen of a threshing
-machine as to deceive the blind man beside me into the ludicrous notion
-that the train was moving rapidly, was heaped a cart-load.  To attempt
-an inventory thereof would be to name everything bulky, unpleasing, and
-sharp-cornered that ever falls into the possession of the Spanish
-peasant. Suffice it to specify that at the summit of the heap swayed a
-crate of chickens whose cackling sounded without hint of interruption
-from Bobadilla to the end of the journey.
-
-The national characteristics of third-class are clearly marked.  Before
-a French train is well under way two men are sure to fall into some
-heated dispute, to which their companions give undivided but speechless
-attention.  The German rides in moody silence; the Italian babbles
-incessantly of nothing.  An Englishman endures a third-class journey
-frozen-featured as if he were striving to convince his fellows that he
-has been thus reduced for once because he has bestowed his purse on the
-worthy poor.  But the truly democratic Spaniard settles down by the
-compartmentful into a cheery family.  Not one of my fellow-sufferers but
-had some reminiscence to relate, not a question arose to which each did
-not offer his frank opinion.  He who descended carried away with him the
-benediction of all; the newcomer became in a twinkling a full-fledged
-member of the impromptu brotherhood.
-
-Nine times I was fervently entreated to partake of a traveler's lunch,
-and my offer to share my own afternoon nibble was as many times declined
-with wishes for good appetite and digestion.  Travelers who assure us
-that this custom inherited from the Moor has died out in Spain are in
-error; it is dead only among foreigners in first-class carriages and
-tourist hotels--who never had it.  The genuine Spaniard would sooner
-slap his neighbor in the face than to eat before him without begging him
-to share the repast.
-
-We halted more than frequently.  On each such occasion there sounded
-above the last screech of the brakes the drone of a guard announcing the
-length of the stay.  Little less often the traveler in the further
-corner of the compartment squirmed his way to the door and departed.
-With a sigh of relief the survivors divided the space equitably between
-them--and were incontinently called upon to yield it up again as some
-dust-cloaked peasant flung his bag of implements against my legs with a
-cheery "buenas tardes" and climbed in upon us.
-
-Then came the task of again getting the train under way.  The brisk "all
-aboard" of our own land would be unbearably rude to the gentle Spanish
-ear.  Whence every station, large or small, holds in captivity a man
-whose only duty in life seems to be that of announcing the departure of
-trains.  He is invariably tattered, sun-bleached, and sandal-footed,
-with the general appearance of one whom life has used not unkindly but
-confounded roughly.  How each station succeeds in keeping its announcer
-in the pink of dilapidation is a Spanish secret.  But there he is,
-without fail, and when the council of officials has at length concluded
-that the train must depart, he patters noiselessly along the edge of the
-platform, chanting in a music weird, forlorn, purely Arabic, a phrase so
-rhythmic that no printed words can more than faintly suggest it:
-
-"Seño-o-o-res viajeros al tre-e-e-en."
-
-"Gentlemen travelers to the train" is all it means in mere words; but
-rolling from the lips of one of these forlorn captives it seems to carry
-with it all the history of Spain, and sinks into the soul like a voice
-from the abysmal past.
-
-Among my fellow-passengers was the first Spanish priest with whom I came
-into conversational contact.  In the retrospect that fact is all but
-effaced by the memory that he was not merely the first but the only
-Spaniard who ever declined my proffer of a cigarette.  To one eager to
-find the prevailing estimation of the priesthood of Spain false or
-vastly overdrawn, this first introduction to the gown augured well.  He
-was neither fat nor sensual: rather the contrary, with the lineaments of
-a man sincere in his work and beneficent in his habits.  His manner was
-affable, without a hint of that patronizing air and pose of sanctity
-frequently to be observed among Protestant clergy, his attitude of
-equality toward the laity peculiarly reminiscent of the priests of
-Buddha.
-
-At the station of San Francisco half the passengers descended.  The
-building was perched on a shelf of rock that fell away behind it into a
-stony gulf.  Surrounding all the station precinct ran a weather-warped
-and blackened fence, ten feet high, along the top of which screamed and
-jostled fully two score women and girls, offering for sale every species
-of ware from cucumbers to turkeys. Hucksters and beggars swarm down--or
-rather up--on San Francisco in such multitudes that the railway company
-was forced to build the fence for the protection of its patrons.  But
-the women, not to be so easily outdone, carry each a ladder to surmount
-the difficulty.  As the train swung on around a pinnacle of rock, we
-caught a long enduring view of the source of the uproar--the populous
-and pauperous city of Loja, lodged in a trough-like hillside across the
-valley.
-
-Not far beyond there burst suddenly on the sight the snow-cowled Sierra
-Nevada, and almost at the same moment the train halted at Puente Pinos.
-I recalled the village as the spot where Columbus saw the ebbing tide of
-his fortunes checked by the messengers of "Ysabel la Católica"; but not
-so the priest.
-
-"One of our great industries, señor," he said, pointing to several
-smoke-belching chimneys near at hand.  "Puente Pinos produces the best
-sugar in Spain."
-
-"The cane is harvested early?" I observed, gazing away across the flat
-fields.
-
-"No, no," laughed the priest, "betabel (sugar beets)."
-
-Spanish railways are as prone as those of Italy to repudiate the printed
-promise of their tickets.  We descended toward sunset at a station named
-Granada only to find that the geographical Granada was still some miles
-distant.  The priest had offered to direct me to an inn or I should
-perhaps have escaped entirely the experience of riding in a Spanish
-street-car.  It crawled for an hour through an ocean of dust, anchoring
-every cable-length to take aboard some floundering pedestrian.  Many of
-these were priests; and as they gathered one by one on either side of my
-companion, the hope I had entertained of discovering more of virtue
-beneath the Spanish sotana than the world grants oozed unrestrainably
-away. For they were, almost without exception, pot-bellied,
-self-satisfied, cynical, with obscenity and the evidences of unnatural
-vice as plainly legible on their countenances as the words on a printed
-page.
-
-We reached at last the central plaza, where my guide pointed out a large
-modern building bearing across the front of its third story the
-inscription, "Gran Casa de Viajeros de la Viuda Robledo."  As I
-alighted, a band of valets de place swept down upon me.  I gave them no
-attention; which did not, of course, lessen the impertinence with which
-they danced about me.  Having guessed my goal, one of them dashed before
-me up the stairs, shouting to the señora to be prepared to receive the
-guest he was bringing.
-
-The widow Robledo was a serene-visaged woman in the early fifties; her
-house a species of family hotel never patronized by foreigners.  We came
-quickly to terms, however; I was assigned a room overhanging the
-culinary regions, for which, with the customary two and a half meals a
-day, I engaged to pay four pesetas.
-
-At the mention of money, the tout, who during all the transaction had
-not once withdrawn the light of his simian countenance, demanded a
-peseta for having found me a lodging.  I reminded him of the real facts
-of the case and invited him to withdraw.  He followed me instead into my
-new quarters, repeating his demands in a bullying voice, and for the
-only time in my Spanish experience I was compelled to resort to physical
-coercion.  Unfortunate indeed is the tourist who must daily endure and
-misjudge the race from these pests, so exactly the antithesis of the
-courteous, uncovetous Spaniard of the working class.
-
-I had not yet removed the outer stain of travel when a vast excitement
-descended upon Granada,--it began to rain.  On every hand sounded the
-slamming of doors, the creaking of unused shutters; from below came up
-the jangling of pans and the agitated voices of servants.  The shower
-lasted nearly ten minutes, and was chronicled at length next day in all
-the newspapers of Spain.
-
-From the edge of Granada city a long green aisle between exotic elms
-leads easily upward to the domain of the Alhambra.  In its deep-shaded
-groves, so near yet seeming so far removed from the stony face of
-thirsty Spain, reigns a dream-inviting stillness, a quiet enhanced
-rather than broken by the murmur of captive brooks.  For this, too,
-remains in memory of the Moor, that the waters of the Genii and Darro
-are still brought to play through a score of little stone channels
-beneath the trees.  There I drifted each morning, other plans
-notwithstanding, to idle away the day on the grassy headland before and
-below which spreads the vastness of the province of Granada, or
-distressing the guardians of the ancient palace with my untourist-like
-loiterings.  But for her fame the traveler would surely pass the
-Alhambra by as a half-ruined nest of bats and beggars.  Yet within she
-retains much of her voluptuous splendor, despite the desolating of time
-and her prostitution to a gaping-stock of tourists.  Like so much of the
-Mussulman's building, the overshadowed palace is effeminate, seeming to
-speak aloud of that luxury and wantonness of the Moor in his decadent
-days before the iron-fisted reyes católicos came to thrust him forth
-from his last European kingdom.  In this she resembles the Taj Mahal;
-yet the difference is great. For the effeminacy of the Alhambra is the
-unrobustness of woman, while the Taj, like the Oriental man, is
-effeminate outwardly, superficially, beneath all which shows sound
-masculinity.
-
-In the city below is only enough to be seen to give contrast to the
-half-effaced traces of magnificence on the hill.  He who comes to
-Granada trusting to read in her the last word of the degradation of the
-once regal and all powerful must continue his quest.  Of squalor and
-beggars she is singularly free--for Spain.  Something of both remains
-for him who will wander through the Albaicin, peering into its
-cave-dwellings, wherein, and at times before which romp brown gypsy
-children garbed in the costume in which the reputed ancestor of us all
-set forth from the valley of Eden, or occasional jade-eyed hoydens of
-the grotto sunning their blacker tresses and mumbling crones plying
-their _bachi_ in conspicuous places. But even this seems rather a misery
-of parade than a reality, a theatrical lying-in-wait for the gullible
-_Busné_ from foreign shores.
-
-By night there is life and movement in Granada; a strolling to and fro
-along the Alameda to the strains of a military band, the droning of the
-water-carriers who bring down lump by lump the ice-fields of the Sierra
-Nevada, and a dancing away of the summer night to the clatter of the
-castanet.  But by day--once only during my stay was the languid pulse of
-the city stirred during the sunlit hours.  A conscript regiment
-thundered in upon us, blocking all traffic and filling the air with a
-fog of dust that dispelled for a time my eagerness to seek again the
-open road; a dust that thick-shrouded beneath its drab the very color of
-caisson and uniform, dry-blanketing the panting horses, and streaking
-the faces of men and officers with figures like unto the ornamental
-writing on the inner walls of the Alhambra.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER IV
-
-                     THE BANKS OF THE GUADALQUIVIR
-
-
-Granada was sleeping a fitful Sunday siesta when I repacked my knapsack
-in the Casa Robledo.  In the streets were only the fruit-sellers from
-the surrounding country, still faintly chanting over the half-empty
-baskets on the backs of their lolling asses.  I paused to spend two
-"perros gordos" for as many pounds of cherries--for he who has once
-tasted the cherries of Granada has no second choice--and trudged away
-through the northern suburb leaving a trail of pits behind me.
-
-The highway surmounted the last crest and swung down to the level of the
-plain.  Like a sea of heat mist diked by the encircling mountains
-stretched the vega, looking across which one saw at a glance no fewer
-than a score of villages half concealed by an inundation of sunshine so
-physically visible that one observed with astonishment that the snow lay
-still unmelted on the peak of Mulhacen behind.
-
-Yet for all the heat I would not have been elsewhere nor doing else than
-striking across the steaming vega of Granada.  In such situations, I
-confess, I like my own company best.  With the finest companion in the
-world a ten-mile tramp through this heat and dust would have been a
-labor like the digging of a ditch.  Alone, with the imagination free to
-take color from the landscape, each petty inconvenience seemed but to
-put me the more in touch with the real Spain.
-
-Just here lies the advantage of traveling in this half-tramp fashion.
-The "personally conducted" traveler, too, sees the Alhambra; yet how
-slight is that compared with sharing the actual life of the Spanish
-people, which the tourist catches if at all in vagrant, posing
-fragments?  To move through a foreign country shut up in a moving room,
-carrying with one the modern luxuries of home, is not travel; we call it
-so by courtesy and for lack of an exact term.  "Il faut payer de sa
-personne."  He who will gather the real honey of travel must be on the
-scene, a "super" at least on the stage itself, not gossiping with his
-fellows in a box.
-
-With all its aridity the vega was richly productive. Olive-trees hung
-heavy, on either hand spread broad fields of grain in which peasants
-were toiling swelteringly as if they had never heard of the common sense
-institution of Sunday.  When sun and tree-tops met, the highway began to
-wind, leaving the vega behind and wandering through low hills among
-which appeared no villages, only an occasional rough-hewn house by the
-way.  Toward twilight there opened a more verdant valley, and a stream,
-rising somewhere near at hand, fell in with the carretera and capered
-prattling along with it into the night.
-
-It was ten perhaps when I came upon a lonely little venta by the
-wayside, a one-story building older than the modern world, serving both
-for dwelling and stable.  The master of the house and her husband were
-both of that light-hearted gentry to whom life means nothing more than
-to be permitted good health and a place to eat an occasional _puchero_.
-With these and a pair of mountain arrieros I gossiped until my eyelids
-grew heavy, and turned in on a husk mattress spread, like that of my
-hosts, on the kitchen floor.
-
-At the first hint of dawn I was off and had set the sun a handicap of
-three miles or more before he began to ruddy the jagged chain to the
-eastward.  The family was already at work, the arrieros wending on their
-southward way singing savage fragments of song; for like the Arab the
-rural andaluz sleeps full-dressed and springs instantly from bed to
-labor.
-
-A country lightly populated continued.  At high noon I reached a
-bath-inviting irrigating stream that wound through a grove of willows
-offering protection enough from the sun for a brief siesta.  Soon after,
-the landscape grew savage and untenanted, and the carretera more and
-more constricted until it passed, like a thread through the eye of a
-needle, through a short tunnel, built, said the inscription, by Isabel
-II--an example of exaggerated Spanish courtesy evidently, for history
-shouts assurance that the activities of that lady were rather
-exclusively confined to less enduring works.  Once released, the gorge
-expanded to a rambling valley with many orchards of apricots and plums,
-still walled, however, by hills so lofty that the sun deserted it early
-and gave the unusual sight of a lingering twilight.
-
-From sunset until well into the night I kept sharp lookout for a public
-hostelry; but only a few peasants' hovels appeared, and with fifty-six
-kilometers in my legs I gave up the search and made my bed of a bundle
-of straw on a little nose of meadow above the highway.  All through the
-night the tramp of asses and the cursing or singing of their drivers
-passing below drifted into my dreams.  The weather was not cold, yet in
-the most silent hour a chilliness half-arousing crept over me, and it
-was with a sense of relief that I awoke at last entirely and wandered
-on.
-
-By daylight the hills receded somewhat, flattening themselves out to
-rolling uplands; the stream grew broad and noisy in its strength.  Then
-suddenly at the turning of an abrupt hill Jaen rose before me, a city
-pitched on a rocky summit like the capping over a haycock, in the center
-the vast cathedral; the whole radiant with the flush of morning and
-surrounded by a soil as red as if the blood of all the Moorish wars were
-gathered here and mixed with the clay.  The highway, catching sight of
-its goal, abandoned unceremoniously the guidance of the river and
-climbed with great strides up the red hillside into the town.
-
-I had been so long up that the day seemed already far advanced.  But
-Jaen was still half abed. I drifted into what was outwardly a little
-_cantina_, with zinc bar and shining spigots, but domestically the home
-of an amiable couple.  The _cantinero_, lolling in the customary
-fat-man's attitude behind the bar, woke with a start from the first of
-that day's siestas when I requested breakfast, while his spouse ceased
-her sweeping to cry out, "Como!  Tan temprano!  Why, it is scarcely
-eight o'clock!"  The lady, however, gave evidence of an un-Spanish
-adaptability by rising to the occasion.  While Señor Corpulence was
-still shaking his head condolingly, she called to the driver of a
-passing flock of goats, one of which, under her watchful eye, yielded up
-a foaming cupful that tided me over until I sat down in the family
-dining-room to a breakfast such as is rarely forthcoming in Spain before
-high noon.
-
-The cantina was no more a lodging-house than a restaurant.  But so
-charming a couple was not to be lost sight of, and before the meal was
-ended I expressed a hope of making my home with them during my stay.
-The landlord was taking breath to express his regrets when the matron,
-after a moment of hesitation, admitted that even that might be possible,
-adding however, with an air of mystery, that she could not be certain
-until toward night.  I left my bundle and sauntered out into the city.
-
-Jaen is a town of the Arab, a steep town with those narrow, sun-dodging
-streets that to the utilitarian are inexcusable but to all others give
-evidence of the wisdom of the Moor.  Content, perhaps, with its past
-history, it is to-day a slow, serenely peaceful place riding at anchor
-in the stream of time and singularly free from that dread disease of
-doing something always.  Unusually full it seemed of ingenuous,
-unhurrying old men engaged only in watching life glide by under the blue
-sky.  I spent half the day chatting with these in the thirsting,
-dust-blown park in the center of the town.  Their language was still a
-dialect of Andalusia, a bit more Castilian perhaps than on the southern
-coast, at any rate now grown as familiar as my own.
-
-Each conversation was punctuated with cigarette smoke.  Nothing in Spain
-is more nearly incessant than the rolling and burning of what Borrow
-dubbed in the days before the French word had won a place in our
-language "paper cigars."  We of America are inclined to look upon
-indulgence in this form of the weed as a failing of youth, undignified
-at least in old men.  Not so the Spaniard.  Whatever his age or station
-in life--the policeman on his beat, the engineer at his throttle, the
-boy at his father's heels, the priest in his gown, puff eternally at
-their cigarillo.  The express-check cashed in a Spanish bank is
-swallowed up in a cloud of smoke as thick as the fog that hovers over
-the Grand Banks; the directors who should attempt to forbid smoking in
-their establishment would in all probability be invited to hump over
-their own ledgers.  The Spaniard is strikingly the antithesis of the
-American in this, that his "pleasures," his addictions come first and
-his work second.  Let the two conflict and his work must be postponed or
-left undone.  In contrast to his ceaseless smoking the Spaniard never
-chews tobacco; his language has no word for that habit.
-
-To the foreigner who smokes Spain is no Promised Land.  The ready-made
-cigarettes are an abomination, the tobacco a stringy shag that grows
-endurable only with long enduring.  Matches, like tobacco, are a
-fabrication--and a snare--of the government monopoly.  Luckily, fire was
-long before matches were.  These old men of Jaen one and all carried
-flint and steel and in lieu of tinder a coil of fibrous rope fitted with
-a nickled ring as extinguisher.  Few peoples equal the Spaniard in
-eagerness and ability to "beat" the government.
-
-I returned at evening to the wineshop to be greeted as a member of the
-household.
-
-"You wondered," laughed the señora, "why I could not answer you this
-morning.  It is because the spare room is rented to Don Luis, here, who
-works at night on the railroad.  Meet Don Luis, who has just risen and
-given permission that you sleep in his bed, which I go now to spread
-with clean sheets."
-
-The railway man was one of nature's satisfactions, a short solid fellow
-of thirty-five, overflowing with contagious cheerfulness.  The libation
-incidental to our introduction being drained, the landlord led the way,
-chair in hand, to the bit of level flagging before the shop.  As we sat
-"al fresco" drinking into our lungs the refreshing air of evening, we
-were joined by a well-dressed man whom I recalled having seen somewhere
-during the day.  He was a lawyer, speaking a pure Castilian with
-scarcely a trace of the local patois, in short, one whom the caste rules
-of any other land of Europe would have forbidden to spend an evening in
-company with a tavern-keeper, a switchman, and a wandering unknown.
-
-"How does it happen, señor," I asked, when our acquaintance had advanced
-somewhat, "that I saw you in the cathedral this morning?"
-
-"The domain of women, priests and tourists?" he laughed.  "Because,
-señor, it is the one place in town where I can get cool."
-
-Truly the heat of a summer day in Jaen calls for some such drastic
-measure, for it grows estival, gigantic, weighing down alike on mind and
-body until one feels imperative necessity of escaping from it somehow,
-of running away from it somewhere; and there is no surer refuge than the
-cavernous cathedral.
-
-This as well as the fact that the edifice contains considerable that is
-artistic led me back to it the next morning.  But this time it was in
-the turmoil of a personally conducted party.  When I had taken refuge in
-a shaded seat across the way, the flock poured out upon the broad stone
-steps and, falling upon a beggar, checked their flight long enough to
-bestow upon him a shower of pity and copper coins.
-
-The mendicant was blind and crippled, outwardly a personification of
-gratitude and humility, and attended by a gaunt-bellied urchin to whom
-might fittingly have been applied the Spanish appellation "child of
-misery."  Long after the hubbub of the passing tourists had died away in
-the tortuous city his meekly cadenced voice drifted on after them:
-
-"Benditos sean, caballeros.  Que Dios se lo pagará mil veces al cielo!"
-
-A curiosity to know whether such gentleness were genuine held me for a
-time in my place across the way.  Silence had settled down.  Only a
-shopkeeper wandering by to a day of drowsing passed now and then; within
-the great cathedral stillness reigned. The urchin ran after each
-passerby, wailing the familiar formula, only to be as often ordered off.
-At length he ascended the steps stealthily and, creeping within a few
-feet of his master, lay down and was instantly lost in sleep, a luxury
-he had evidently not tasted for a fortnight.
-
-The beggar rocked to and fro on his worthless stumps, now and again
-uttering as mournful a wail as if his soul had lost not one but all save
-a scattered half-dozen of its strings.  Gradually the surrounding
-silence drew his attention.  He thrust a hand behind one of his unhuman
-ears and listened intently. Not a sound stirred.  He groped with his
-left hand along the stones, then with the right and, suddenly touching
-the sleeping child, a tremor of rage shivered through his misshapen
-carcass.  Feeling with his finger tips until he had located the boy's
-face, he raised his fist, which was massive as that of a horseshoer,
-high above his head and brought it down three times in quick succession.
-They were blows to have shattered the panel of a door; but the boy
-uttered only a little stifled whine and, springing to his feet, took up
-again his task, now and then wiping away with a sleeve the blood that
-dripped from his face down along his tattered knees.
-
-Before the sun had reached its full strength, I struck off to explore
-the barren bluff that overlooks Jaen on the south and east.  Barely had
-I gained the first crest, however, before the inexorable leaden heat was
-again upon me, and the rest of the day was a perspiring labor.  Only the
-reflection that real travel and sight-seeing is as truly work as any
-life's vocation lent starch to my wilted spirits.
-
-At intervals of two or three hundred yards along the precipitous cliff
-that half circles the city stood the shelter of an octroi guard, built
-of anything that might deflect a ray of sunlight.  In the shade of each
-crouched a ragged, ennui-eyed man staring away into the limitless
-expanse of sunshine.  Their fellows may be found forming a circle around
-every city in the kingdom of Spain, the whole body numbering many
-thousands.  The impracticable, the quixotic character of official Spain
-stands forth nowhere more clearly than in this custom of sentencing an
-army of her sons to camp in sloth about her cities on the bare chance of
-intercepting ten-cent's worth of smuggling, when the same band working
-even moderately might produce tenfold the octroi revenues of the land.
-
-I halted with one of the tattered fellows, whose gladness for the
-unusual boon of companionship was tempered by a diffidence that was
-almost bashfulness, so rarely did he come in contact with his
-fellow-man. For a long hour we sat together in the shadow of the hut,
-our eyes drifting away over the gray-roofed, closely-packed city below.
-When our conversation touched on the loneliness of his situation the
-guard grew vehement in bewailing its dreariness and desolation.  But
-when I hinted that the octroi might perhaps be abolished to advantage,
-he sprang to his feet crying almost in terror:
-
-"For los clavos de Cristo, señor!  What then would become of nosotros?
-I have no other trade whatever than to be guard to the octroi."
-
-A sorry craft indeed, this squatting out a lifetime under a grass hut.
-
-The bluish haze of a summer evening was gathering over Jaen when,
-returning through a winding street to my lodging, there fell on my ear
-the thrum of a solitary guitar and the rich and mellow voice of a street
-singer.  The musician was a blind man of fifty, of burly build and a
-countenance brimming with good cheer and contentment, accompanied by a
-woman of the same age.  As I joined the little knot of peasants and
-townsmen gathered about him, his song ended and he drew out a packet of
-hand bills.
-
-"On this sheet, señores," he announced, holding one up, "are all the
-songs I have sung for you. And they are all yours for a perro gordo."
-
-I was among the first to buy, glad to have paid many times this mere
-copper to be able to carry home even one of those languorous ballads so
-filled with the serene melancholy of the Moor and the fire of Andalusia.
-But the sheet bore nothing but printed words.
-
-"Every word is there, señores," continued the minstrel, as if in
-response to my disappointment.  "As for the music, anyone can remember
-that or make it up for himself."
-
-To illustrate how simple this might be he threw a hand carelessly across
-his guitar and struck up another of the droning, luring melodies, that
-rose and fell and drifted away through the passages of the dimming city.
-Easy, indeed!  One could as easily remember or make up for one's self
-the carol of the meadow lark in spring or the lullaby of the nightingale
-in the darkened tree-tops.
-
-That I might catch the five-thirty train my host awoke me next morning
-at three-twenty.  I turned over for a nap and descending in the dawn by
-the dust-blanketed Alameda to the station two miles distant, found this
-already peopled with a gathering of all the types of southern Spain.
-The train was due in twenty minutes, wherefore the ticket-office, of
-course, was already closed.  After some search I discovered the agent,
-in the person of a creature compared with whom Caliban would have been a
-beauty, exchanging stories with a company of fellow-bandits on the
-crowded platform.  He informed me in no pleasant manner that it was too
-late to buy a ticket.  When I protested that the legal closing hour was
-but five minutes before train time, he shrugged his shoulders and
-squinted away down the track as if he fancied the train was already in
-sight.  I decoyed him into the station at last, but even then he refused
-to sell a ticket beyond Espeluy.
-
-We reached that junction soon after and I set off westward along the
-main line.  The landscape was rich and rolling, broad stretches of
-golden grain alternating with close-shaven plains seething in the sun.
-Giant cacti again bordered the way.  Once, in the forenoon, I came upon
-a refreshing forest, but shadows were rare along the route.  The line
-was even more traveled than that below Honda. Field-laborers passed
-often, while sear-brown peasant women, on dwarf donkeys jogged by in
-almost continual procession on their way to or from market.
-
-Not once during all my tramps on the railways of Spain had a train
-passed of which the engineer did not give me greeting.  Sometimes it was
-merely the short, crisp "Vaya!" more often the complete expression "Vaya
-V. con Dios!" not infrequently accompanied by a few words of good cheer.
-Here on the main line I had occasion to test still further the
-politeness of the man at the throttle.  I had rolled a cigarette only to
-find that I had burned my last match.  At that moment the Madrid-bound
-express swung out of a shallow cutting in the hills ahead.  I caught the
-eye of the engineer and held up the cigarette in sign of distress.  He
-saw and understood, and with a kindly smile and a "Vaya!" as he passed,
-dropped two matches at my very feet.
-
-It was not far beyond that I caught my first glimpse of the
-Guadalquivir.  Shades of the Mississippi!  The conquering Moor had the
-audacity to name this sluggish, dull-brown stream the "Wad-al-Gkebir,"
-the "Great River!"  Yet, after all, things are great or small merely by
-comparison.  To a people accustomed only to such trickles of water as
-had thus far crossed my path in the peninsula no doubt this over-grown
-brook, bursting suddenly on their desert eyes, had seemed worthy the
-appellation. But many streams wandering by behind the barn of an
-American farmer and furnishing the old swimming-hole are far greater
-than the Guadalquivir.
-
-I crossed it toward three of the afternoon by an ancient stone bridge of
-many arches that seemed fitted to its work as a giant would be in
-embroidering doilies.  Beyond lay Andújar, a hard-baked, crumbling town
-of long ago, swirling with sand; famous through all Spain for its porous
-clay jars. In every street sounded the soft slap of the potter; I peeped
-into a score of cobble-paved courts where the newly baked _jarras_ were
-heaped high or were being wound with straw for shipment.
-
-A long search failed to disclose a casa de comidas in all the town.  The
-open market overflowed with fruit, however, stocked with which I
-strolled back across the river to await the midnight train.  It was
-packed with all the tribes of Spain, in every sleeping attitude.  Not
-until we had passed Córdoba at the break of day did I find space to sit
-down and drowse for an hour before we rumbled into Seville.
-
-I had exhibited my dust-swathed person in at least half a dozen hotels
-and fled at announcement of their charges, when I drifted into the
-narrow calle Rosario and entered the "Fonda de las Quatro Naciones."
-There ensued a scene which was often to be repeated during the summer.
-The landlord greeted me in the orange-scented patio, noted my foreign
-accent, and jumped instantly to the conclusion, as Spaniards will, that
-I knew no Castilian, in spite of the fact that I was even then
-addressing him with unhesitating glibness.  Motioning to me to be
-seated, he raced away into the depths of the fonda calling for
-"Pasquale."  That youth soon appeared, in tuxedo and dazzling expanse of
-shirt-front, extolling as he came the uncounted virtues of his house, in
-a flowing, unblushing imitation of French. Among those things that I had
-not come to Spain to hear was Spanish mutilation of the Gaelic tongue.
-For a long minute I gazed at the speaker with every possible evidence of
-astonishment.  Then turning to the landlord I inquired in most solemn
-Castilian.
-
-"Está loco, señor?  Is he insane that he jabbers such a jargon?"
-
-"Cómo, señor!" gasped Pasquale in his own tongue.  "You are not then a
-Frenchman?"
-
-"Frenchman, indeed!" I retorted.  "Yo, señor, soy americano."
-
-"Señor!" cried the landlord, bowing profoundly, "I ask your pardon on
-bended knee.  In your Castilian was that which led me to believe it was
-not your native tongue.  Now, of course, I note that it has merely the
-little pequeñísimos peculiarities that make so charming the
-pronunciation of our people across the ocean."
-
-A half-hour later I was installed in a third-story room looking down
-upon the quiet little calle Rosario, and destined to be my home for a
-fortnight to come. During all that time Pasquale served me at table
-without once inflicting upon me a non-Spanish word. Nor did he once
-suspect what a hoax I had played on the "Four Nations" by announcing my
-nationality without prefixing the qualification "norte."
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER V
-
-                           THE TORERO AT HOME
-
-
-Even though one deny the right of its inhabitants to pity the man who
-must live and die elsewhere, even he who finds it panting and simmering
-in the heat of summer, will still count it no punishment to spend a
-fortnight in Seville.  Tranquillity and that laggard humor so befitting
-vacation days reign within its precincts; yet it is a real city, never
-falling quite inert even at the hour of siesta, which is so like the
-silence of the grave in other towns of Andalusia.  In the slender calle
-Rosario itself the stillness was never supreme, but tempered always by
-the droning of a passing _ajero_ with his necklace of garlic, an
-itinerant baker, or a blind crone hobbling by with the fifth or the
-tenth of a lottery ticket, crooning in mournful voice, "La lotería!  El
-numero trienta seis mil quinientos cincuenta y cinco-o-o. Who will win a
-fortune in the lotería-a-a?"  Then above all else the soft,
-quarter-hourly booming of the cathedral bells to mark the passing of the
-day, like mile-stones on a wandering highway.
-
-Nor with all her languor is Seville slovenly.  Outwardly, like all that
-carries the ear-mark of the Moor, she is bare.  In the first brief
-survey one may fancy one's self in a city of dismal hovels.  But this is
-because the houses are turned wrong-side out; a glimpse into one of the
-marble-paved patios, fragrant with orange-trees and cooled by fountains
-throwing their waters high in the dry air, forever dispells the
-illusion.
-
-My first full day in Seville fell on a holiday dedicated to San Pedro
-which, chancing also to be my birthday, it was easy to imagine a
-personal festival. In truth, the celebration of the day was marked by
-nothing other than a bit more indolence than usual. The real fiesta
-began at night in the Alameda of Hercules.  There, among a hundred
-booths, the chief object of interest was a negro, the first of his race,
-one might fancy, who ever invaded the city.
-
-By day, indeed, there is little else to do in Seville than the royal
-occupation of doing nothing, a stroll along the Sierpes in the morning,
-a retreat toward noisy, glaring noonday to the cool and silent cathedral
-or those other churches that rival it as museums of art, there to wander
-undisturbed among masterpieces of Spain's top-most century.  The
-cathedral, by the way, houses the most recent traveler in the calendar
-of saints.  Saint Anthony of Padua, not many years ago, released by the
-dexterous knife of an impulsive admirer, struck out into the unknown and
-journeyed as far as our own New York.  But there repenting such conduct
-at his years or daring to venture no further when his companion found a
-sojourn in the Tombs imperative, he returned to his place, and resumed
-it so exactly that only the sharpest eye can detect the evidence of his
-unseemly excursion.
-
-A city that styles her most important street that "of the Serpents,"
-even though it harbors no more of the outcasts of the pavement than many
-another famous thoroughfare, may be expected to abound in other strange
-names.  Nor are they lacking.  How unworthy his lodging must the worldly
-Sevillian feel who wanders uncertainly homeward in the small hours to
-his abode in "Jesús del Gran Poder"--"Powerful Jesus street."  Or with
-what face can the merchant turn off after a day of fleecing his
-fellow-man toward his dwelling in "Amor de Dios"?  Top-heavy
-nomenclature is not confined to the streets.  There are many windows in
-which one may read the announcement of a "Media Noche de Jamón."  No, it
-is not a new law by the cortes, but a "Middle of the Night of Ham," or,
-succinctly, the over-worked ham sandwich.  The uninstructed may be led
-at sight of a building proclaiming itself an "Academia del Tiro al
-Blanco" into the belief that Seville is overrun with institutions of
-higher learning.  Not so, distinctly not so.  The "Academy of the Shot
-at the White" is what less extravagant and imaginative peoples dub a
-shooting gallery.
-
-The man in the street is frequently no less colorful in his language.
-Yet the crisp, trenchant word common to that personage the world over is
-here, too, in full force, led by that never idle explosive "hombre."
-Dictionarically speaking, "hombre" means "man," and nothing more--which
-only proves how dismally the dictionary has failed to keep up with the
-times.  For child, woman, or hen-pecked male answers to the expression
-as readily as to his own name.  A sevillano leading a pup at the end of
-a string may be frequently observed to give a jerk at the leash and cry
-over his shoulder, "Hombre! Vámonos!"--"Come along, man!"
-
-Anent the man in the street, it may be asserted that the Sevillian is
-usually there.  Writers of Spanish romances have for centuries sought to
-win our sympathy for their love-lorn heroes by stationing them in the
-public way to whisper their pleadings through the cold bars of a reja.
-The picture is true; the lover of flesh and blood and of to-day still
-stands there.  But so, for that matter, does the butcher's boy, the
-ol'-clothes man, and even less reputable persons.  In Spanish newspapers
-the national wealth of phrase is too often overshadowed--like the news
-columns--by the touching assurance of personal announcements.  Rare the
-page that is not half taken up with a black-bordered inset conveying the
-information that:
-
-"Señor and Señora Perez have the honor to advise their sorrowing friends
-and business associates that little Willie Perez, aged six, went up to
-heaven at 7:32 last evening."
-
-There is nothing like being exact and punctual in these little matters.
-
-Toward sunset, after the siesta, it is not merely à la mode but good
-sense to stroll down to the banks of the Guadalquivir by the Golden
-Tower and drift an hour or two back and forth along the deep-shaded
-Alameda.  There one will be in the best company in Seville--and the
-worst; for all the city is there, lolling in its carriage or pattering
-along the gravel in its hempen sandals.
-
-But it is only at night that Seville is wholly and genuinely awake and
-approaches somewhat to that fountain of joy her inhabitants would have
-the world believe her.  Then at last does she shake off entirely the
-daytime lassitude.  The noises of the day are all there, the
-street-hawkers have gained a hundredfold in volume of lung, in number,
-and in activity, the cathedral bells seem twice as loud.  Toward nine
-all the city and his wife and children and domestics are gathered or
-gathering in the great focal point, the palm-fringed Plaza San Fernando.
-The attractions are several.  First of all is the "cinematagrafo," a
-moving-picture machine throwing its mirth and puerility on a sheet
-suspended in the center of the plaza.  Second, a military band, not a
-caterwauling of strange noises that one would desire suppressed by fire
-or earthquake, but a company seriously and professionally engaged in
-producing genuine music, which it does from near nine till after
-midnight as continuously as any band could be expected to until some
-invention makes it possible to blow a trombone and smoke a cigarette at
-one and the same time. Third, there is the excitement which the mingling
-together in crowds brings every Latin people, and the supreme pleasure
-of strolling to and fro admiring one another and themselves.  Fourth, if
-so many excuses are needed, there is fresh air and the nearest approach
-to coolness that the city affords.
-
-Yet with all Seville gathered the thousand roped-off chairs around the
-curtain are rarely half filled; for to sit in one costs a "fat dog," as
-the Spaniard facetiously dubs his Lacedemonian two-cent piece.  But what
-a multitude in the rest of the square!  Out of doors all Spain mixes
-freely and heartily.  Hidalgos with the right to conceal their premature
-baldness from Alfonso himself shudder not in the least at being jostled
-by beggars; nay, even exchange with them at times a few words of banter.
-Silly young fops, in misfit imitation of Parisian style, a near-Panama
-set coquettishly over one ear, trip by arm in arm, swinging their jaunty
-canes. Workingmen scorning such priggishness stride slowly by in trim
-garments set off by bright red _fajas_ in which is stuck a great
-_navaja_, or clasp-knife of Albacete.  Rich-bosomed _majas_ with their
-black masses of mane-like hair, in crimson skirts or yellow--as yellow
-as the gown of Buddha--drift languorously by with restless fan.  No type
-is missing from the strolling multitude.  Strolling, too, it is, in
-spite of the congestion; for the slow tide-like movement of the throng
-not only gives opportunity but compels any lazy foreigner to walk
-whether he will or not.  Everyone is busy with gallantry and doing
-nothing--doing it only as the Spaniard can who, thanks to temperament,
-climate, and training knows that peerless art and follows it with
-pleasure, not with the air of one who prefers or pretends to prefer to
-be working.
-
-The Sevillian is in many things, above all in his amusements, a
-full-grown child.  Groups of portly business men, Seville's very
-captains of industry, sit hour by hour watching the unrolling of just
-such films, as are shown in our "nickelodeons," shouting with glee and
-clapping each other on the shoulder when a man on the screen falls off a
-chair or a baker's boy deluges a passerby with flour.  No less hilarious
-are the priests, shaking their fat sides with merriment at the pictured
-discomfiture of one of their guild in eager pursuit of some frail
-beauty. As interested as the rest are the policemen--and as little
-engaged in the fulfillment of their duties, whatever those may be.  A
-poor species, a distressingly unattractive breed are these city
-policemen of Spain, in their uniform closely resembling checkerboard
-pajamas, lacking even the Hibernian dignity of size, stoop-shouldered
-and sunken-chested with lounging on their spines and the inordinate
-sucking of cigarette smoke into their lungs.  Of the self-respect and
-pride of office characteristic of the national guardia civil they have
-none whatever.  I recall no evening in the Plaza San Fernando that at
-least one pair of these wind-broken, emasculate caricatures of manhood
-did not fall to quarreling, dancing in rage and shrieking mutual curses
-in their smoke-ruined voices, while the throng dogged them on.
-
-Families gather early in the plaza.  There ensues a moment or two of
-idle thrumming--for father or brother is certain to bring his
-guitar--then out bursts the sharp, luring _fandango_; the little girls
-in snowy white squirm a moment on their seats, spring suddenly out upon
-the gravel, and fall to dancing to the click of their castanets as
-rhythmically as any professionals.  They do not dance to "show off,"
-they are indeed rarely conscious of attracting attention; they dance
-because the fire in them compels, because they wish to--and what the
-Andalusian wishes to do he does then and there, gloriously indifferent
-to whoever may be looking on.  Let him who can imagine an American
-bringing his guitar to the public square of a large city and, surrounded
-by thousands, play serenely on into the depths of the night.
-
-[Illustration: A Sevillian street]
-
-The Andalusian is one of the most truly musical beings on earth, in the
-sense that his music expresses his real emotions.  Song is almost his
-natural mode of expression, always spontaneous, with none of the
-stiffness of learned music.  He has no prelude, follows no conscious
-rules, displays none of that preliminary affectation and patent evidence
-of technic that so frequently makes our northern music stilted and
-unenchanting.  He plunges headlong into his song, anywhere, at any time,
-as a countryman unsullied by pedantry enters into conversation.
-
-[Illustration: The Plaza, San Fernando.  "A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  Quién
-quiere beber?"]
-
-Thus wanes the night in the Plaza San Fernando, marked by the boom of
-the Giralda's bells, the bawling of vendors of lottery-tickets, of
-titbits, of matches, of _azucarillos_, of _naranjeros_ crying their
-oranges, of boys carrying miniature roulette-wheels with a cone of
-sherbet as prize, that the little children may be taught to gamble early
-in life; and sharply above all else and most incessantly the
-alpargata-shod water-seller, with his vessel like a powder-can slung
-across one shoulder, his glasses clinking musically, crying, crying
-always in his voluptuous, slovenly dialect:
-
-"A'ua!  A'ua fresca!  A'ua fresca como la nieve! Quién quiere beber?"
-
-We have street calls in the United States, but he whose ear is daily
-assaulted therewith would have difficulty in imagining how musical these
-may be when filled, like the thrum of the guitar, the street ballad, the
-"carol of the lusty muleteer," and the wail of the railway announcer,
-with the inner soul of Andalusia.
-
-There is to-day very little left of the national costume of Spain.  One
-may except the stiff, square-cut sombrero, the alpargata of workman and
-beggar, the garb of the arriero, fitting and suiting him as if it had
-grown on him, the blanket which the peasant wears thrown over one
-shoulder, not because he realizes what a charm this adds to his
-appearance, but because he often sleeps out of doors or on the stone
-floor of public stables.  Last, and least to be forgotten, is the
-mantilla.  Except for it the women of Spain have succumbed to the ugly
-creations of Paris; may that day be centuries distant when the
-abomination masquerading under the name of woman's hat makes its way
-into the peninsula.  Yet there is never among Spanish women that gaudy
-affectation of style so frequent elsewhere.  Give her the merest strip
-of gay calico and the española will make it truly ornamental; with a red
-flower to wear over one temple and a mantilla draped across the back of
-her head she is more pleasingly adorned than the best that Paris can
-offer.
-
-There is something unfailingly coquettish about the mantilla.  It sets
-best, perhaps, with a touch of Arab blood; and in the Plaza San Fernando
-this is seldom lacking.  Everywhere are morisco faces framed in the
-black mantilla and, as if in further reminder of Mohammedan days, there
-still remains the instinctive habit of holding a corner of the shawl
-across the chin.  Thus accoutered only the Castilian "ojear" can in any
-sense express the power given the andaluza by her Oriental ancestry to
-do or say so much with a glance of her black eye.  With the fan, too,
-she is an adept.  The Japanese geisha is in comparison a bungler.  The
-woman of Spain has her fan in such fine training that it will carry on
-extended conversations for her without a word from her lips, as Spanish
-peasants can talk from two hilltops miles apart by the mere motions of
-their arms.
-
-But who of all the misinformers of humanity first set afoot the rumor
-that the sevillana is beautiful? "Salada" she is, brimming over with
-that "salt" for which she is so justly renowned; chic, too, at times,
-with her tiny feet and hands and graceful carriage; and always
-voluptuous.  But one might wander long in the music-livened Plaza San
-Fernando without espying a woman to whom could be granted the
-unqualified adjective beautiful.  On the other hand it is rare that one
-meets a sevillana, unless she be deeply marked by the finger of time,
-who is ugly; never, if my search was thorough, one scrawny or angular.
-In Spain is never that blending and mixture of all types as in our land
-of boundless migration; hence one may generalize.  Salada, graceful,
-full of languor, above all wholly free from pose, is the sevillana in
-her mantilla.  Of education in the bookish sense she has little, of the
-striving after "culture" to the divorce of common sense none whatever.
-She may--and probably does--know nothing of the sciences, or the
-wrinkle-browed joys of the afternoon club.  But she is brimming with
-health and sound good sense, above all she is incontestably charming;
-and is not this after all--whisper it not in New England--the chief duty
-of her sex?
-
-The Andalusian is primarily an out-door people; not merely in the plain
-and physical sense, but in life and character.  He lives his life
-openly, frankly, setting his face in no mask of Puritanical pretension
-when he sallies forth into the world, being himself always, in public or
-in private.  All in all among the sincerest, he is also the most
-abstemious and healthiest of peoples; not yet spoiled by luxury. His
-existence is reduced to simplicity; more exactly he has never lost touch
-with eternal nature.  He takes time to live and never admits the
-philosophy that he must work before resting, but hinges his conduct on
-the creed that he must live first, and do whatever of work there is time
-left to do.  In no sense is he lazy; rather in his sound sanity he has a
-real appreciation of the value of life.  To-day is the great day to him.
-Live now is his motto, not put off living until he has earned enough to
-live, only to find it too late to begin.  One would seek through Seville
-in vain for that strained, devil-chased air so stamped on our own
-national physiognomy.  Whatever his vocation, or the hour of the day,
-the Spaniard has always time to choose the shady side of the street,
-time to halt and talk with his friends.  As I watched him night by night
-in the Plaza San Fernando--and this is largely typical of all
-Spain--there came the reflection that the lands of continual striving,
-the lands where "culture" demands the repression of every natural
-emotion and enthusiasm, are dreary realms, indeed, compared with the
-Living Latin South.  Here is not merely animation, but life, real life
-everywhere, no mere feigned living.
-
-On my second Sunday in Seville I attended my second bullfight.  The
-first I had seen from the depths of the _sombra_, believing the
-assertion that none but a man with Arabic blood in his veins could
-endure the unshaded side of the arena.  But my fear of sun-stroke had
-melted away; moreover, the sun-side gate keeper is most easily
-satisfied.  I bought a ticket at a corner of las Sierpes and entered the
-plaza as soon as the doors were opened.
-
-Not a half-dozen had preceded me when I took a place on the stone bank
-directly behind the red _tablas_. On my heels appeared a rabble of
-ragged, joyful fellows, who quickly demonstrated that I had not, as I
-supposed, chosen the foremost seat, by coming to roost along the top of
-the barrier in front of me. One shudders to reflect what would befall
-individuals in an American baseball crowd who should conduct themselves
-as did these habitués of the Sevillian _sol_. But to the mercurial
-andaluz, accustomed always and anywhere to give his idiosyncrasies and
-enthusiasms full play, the wildest antics seem quite in place.
-
-If, as many reputed authorities will have us believe, the Spaniard's
-love for "toros" is dying out, what must it have been before the
-dissolution began?  At any rate it has not yet sunk to that point where
-the vast plaza of Seville will hold all who would come, even to these
-_novilladas_ in which the bulls are young and the fighters not yet more
-famous than a member of the cortes.  From a dozen entries the spectators
-poured into the enclosure; in the blazing semicircle bronzed peasants
-and workmen with wine-swollen _botas_, across the shimmering sand richly
-attired señoritas in the white mantilla of festival, attended by
-middle-aged duenas and, at respectful distance, by caballeros of
-effeminate deportment.  The española is as ardent a lover of bulls as
-the men.  One must not, however, jump to the conclusion that she is
-cruel and inhuman.  On the contrary she is in many things exceedingly
-tender-hearted.  Habit and the accustomed way of thinking make vast
-differences, and the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years in
-continual warfare may account for a certain callousness to physical
-suffering.
-
-The Spanish plaza de toros is the nearest modern prototype of the Roman
-Coliseum; when it is filled one may easily form a mental picture of the
-scene at a gladiatorial combat.  By four-thirty the voice of the
-circular multitude was like the rumble of some distant Niagara.  Howling
-vendors of thirst-quenching fruits climbed over our blistering knees;
-between the barriers circulated hawkers of everything that may be sold
-to the festive-humored.  Spain may be tardy in all else, but her
-bullfights begin sharply on time.  At the first stroke of five from the
-Giralda a bugle sounded, the barrier gates swung open, and the game was
-on.
-
-It would be not merely presumptuous, which is criminal, but trite, which
-is worse, to attempt at this late day to picture a scene that has been
-described a hundred times in every civilized tongue and in all the gamut
-of styles from Byronic verse to commercial-traveler's prose.  But
-whereas every bullfight is the same in its general features, no two were
-ever alike in the unexpected incidents that make the sport of perennial
-interest to the _aficionados_.  An "aficionado," be it noted in passing,
-is a "fan," a being quite like our own "rooter" except that, his
-infirmity being all but universal, he is not looked down upon with such
-pity by his fellow-countrymen.
-
-Seville is the acknowledged headquarters of the taurine art.  In our
-modern days of migratory mixture of races and carelessness of social
-lines, toreros have arisen from all classes and in all provinces--nay,
-even in foreign lands.  One of Spain's famous _matadores_ is a Parisian,
-and one even more renowned bears the nickname of the "Mexican
-Millionaire." But the majority of bullfighters are still sons of
-peasants and small landholders of Andalusia in general and the vicinity
-of Seville in particular.  The torero touring "the provinces" is as fond
-of announcing himself a sevillano as are our strolling players of
-claiming "New Yawk" as home.  Nowadays, too, the bulls are bred in all
-parts of Spain and by various classes of persons.  But the _ganaderías_
-of Andalusia still supply most of the animals that die in the plazas of
-Spain, and command the highest prices.  Among the principal raisers is
-the Duke of Veragua, who boasts himself--and can, it is said, make good
-the boast--a lineal descendant of that Christopher Columbus whose
-wandering ashes now repose in the cathedral of Seville.  The duke,
-however, takes second place to one Eduardo Miúra, whose bulls are so
-noted for their fury that a movement has for some time been on foot to
-demand double fees for facing animals from his pastures.
-
-The bulls of both my Sundays in Seville were "miúras," and fully
-sustained the fame of their ganadero.  Each córrida began with the usual
-caparisoned parade, the throwing of the key, the fleeing of the
-over-cautious _alguaciles_ amid the jeering of the multitude.  Is there
-another case in history of a national sport conducted by the vested
-authorities of government?  Perhaps so, in Nero's little matinées in the
-toasting of Christians.  But here the rules of the game are altered and
-to some extent framed by those authorities.  Imagine the city fathers
-of, let us say Boston, debating with fiery zeal whether a batter should
-be allowed to run on the third strike!  Then, too, the mayor or his
-representative is the umpire, safely so, however, for he is securely
-locked in his box high above the rabble and there is never a losing team
-to lie in wait for him beyond the club-house.
-
-It is the all but universal custom, I note in skimming through the
-impressions of a half-hundred travelers in Spain, to decry bullfighting
-in the strongest terms.  Nay, almost without exception, the chroniclers,
-who appear in most cases to be full-grown, able-bodied men, relate how a
-sickness nigh unto death came upon them at about the time the first bull
-was getting warmed up to his business which forced them to flee the
-scene forever.  One must, of course, believe they are not posing before
-the gentle reader, but it comes at times with difficulty.  To be sure,
-the game has little in common with croquet or dominoes; there are stages
-of it, particularly the disemboweling of helpless hacks, that give the
-newcomer more than one unpleasant quarter of an hour. Indeed, I am
-inclined to think that had I a dictator's power I should abolish
-bullfighting to-morrow, or next Monday at least; but so, for that
-matter, I should auto races and country billboards, Salome dancers and
-politicians, train-boys and ticket speculators.  Unfortunately--
-
-At any rate, I came out to this second córrida in Seville and left it
-with the hope of seeing several more.  Certainly there is no other
-"sport" that can more quickly and fully efface from the mind of the
-spectator his personal cares and problems; and is not this, after all,
-the chief, if not the only raison d'être of professional sport?  There
-is an intensity in the moment of a matador standing with steeled eye and
-bared sword before a bull panting in tired anger, head lowered, a hush
-of expectancy in the vast audience, the _chulos_ poised on tiptoe at a
-little distance, an equine corpse or two tumbled on the sand to give the
-scene reality, compared with which the third man, third strike in the
-ninth inning of a 0-0 contest is as exciting as a game of marbles.  It
-is his hunger for such moments of frenetic attention that makes the
-Spaniard a lover of the córrida, not the sight of blood and the injuries
-to beast and man, which, in his intoxication at the game itself, he
-entirely loses sight of.
-
-The newcomer will long remember his first bull--certainly if, as in my
-own case, the first bandarillero slips at the moment of thrusting his
-barbed darts and is booted like a soccer football half across the ring
-by the snorting animal.  Still less shall I forget the chill that shot
-through me when, with the fifth bull at the height of his fury, a gaunt
-and awkward boy of fifteen sprang suddenly over the barriers and shook
-his ragged blouse a dozen times in the animal's face.  As many times he
-escaped a goring by the closest margin.  The toreros did not for a
-moment lose their heads.  Calmly and dexterously they maneuvered until
-one of them drew the bull off, when another caught the intruder by the
-arm and marched him across the ring to the shade of the mayor's box.
-There the youth, who had taken this means of gaining an audience, lifted
-up a mournful voice and asked for food, asserting that he was
-starving--a statement that seemed by no means improbable.  The response
-was thumbs down.  But he gained his point, in a way, for he was given a
-fortnight in prison.  Incidents of the sort had grown so frequent of
-late in the plaza of Seville as to make necessary a new law, promulgated
-in large letters on that day's programme.  Printed words, in all
-probability, meant nothing to this neglected son of Seville. Such
-occurrences are not always due to the same motive.  The impulsive
-andaluz is frequently not satisfied with being a mere spectator at the
-national game.  A score of times the tattered aficionados about me
-pounced upon one of their fellows and dragged him down just as he was on
-the point of bounding into the ring.  Indeed, as at any spectacle the
-world over, the audience was as well worth attention as the performance
-itself.  On the blistering stone terraces of an Andalusian sol animation
-and comedy are never lacking.  In his excitement at a clever thrust the
-Sevillian often sees fit to fall--quite literally--on the neck of a
-total stranger; friends and foes alike embrace each other and dance
-about on the feet, shoulders, or heads of their uncomplaining neighbors.
-There is a striking similarity between the bantering of a famous torero
-by the aficionados and the "joshing" of a favorite pitcher in an
-American ball park, but the good day has yet to come when the recorder
-of a home-run will be showered in his circuit of the bleachers with hats
-and wine-skins, handfuls of copper coins, and tropical deluges of
-cigars.  Nor does the most inexcusable fumble call forth such a storm of
-derision as descends upon a cowardly bull.  The jibes have in them often
-more of wit than vulgarity, as when an aficionado rises in his place and
-solemnly offers the animal his seat in the shade.  The height of all
-insults is to call him a cow.  Through it all, the leather wine-bottles
-pass constantly from hand to hand.  A dozen of these I had thrust upon
-me during the fight, and tasted good wine each time.  The proceeding is
-so antiseptic as to warm the heart of the most raving germ-theorist, for
-the bota is fitted with a tiny spout out of which the drinker, holding
-the receptacle high above his head, lets the wine trickle down his
-throat.  The skins so swollen when the córrida begins are limp and
-flaccid when it ends.
-
-It seems the custom of travelers to charge that the apparent bravery of
-the bullfighter is mere pseudo-courage.  Of all the detractors, however,
-not one records having strolled even once across the arena while the
-fight was on.  In truth, the torero's calling is distinctly dangerous.
-The meanest bull that enters a Spanish ring, one for whom the spectators
-would demand "banderillas de fuego"--explosives,--is a more fearful
-brute than the king of a Texas ranch.  Their horns are long, spreading
-and needle-pointed; the _empresa_ that dared turn into the ring a bull
-with the merest tip of a horn blunted or broken would be jeered into
-oblivion.  Not a year passes that scores of toreros are not sent to the
-hospital.
-
-The Spanish espada is almost invariably "game" to the last.  The sixth
-bull of this Sunday's tournament was, as often happens, the most
-ferocious.  He killed six horses, wounded two _picadores_, tossed a
-chulo as high as a one-story house and, at the first pass of Vasquez,
-the matador, knocked him down and gored him in the neck.  A coward, one
-fancies, would have lost no time in withdrawing.  Vasquez, on the
-contrary, crawled to his feet and swung half round the circle that all
-might see he was unafraid, though blood was streaming down his
-bespangled breast. The alguaciles between the barriers commanded him to
-retire, but it was to be noted that not one of them showed the least
-hint of entering the ring to enforce the order.  The diestro advanced
-upon the defiant brute, unfurled his red muleta, poised his sword--and
-swooned flat on the sand.  The bull walked slowly to him, sniffed at his
-motionless form, and with an expression almost human of disdain, turned
-and trotted away.
-
-"Palmas al toro!" bawled a boisterous fellow at my elbow, and the vast
-circle burst out in a thunder of hand-clapping and cries of "Bravo,
-toro!" while the wounded espada still lay senseless in the center of the
-ring.
-
-He was carried off by his _cuadrilla_, and the _sobresaliente_, which is
-to say the "jumper-over," or substitute, marched as boldly into the ring
-as if accidents were unknown.  Once begun a córrida knows no
-intermission, even though a man is killed.  The newcomer took steady aim
-and drove the three-foot sword to the very hilt between the heaving
-shoulders; then nonchalantly turned his back and strolled away. The bull
-did not fall, but wabbled off into the shade to lean up against the
-tablas as if he had suddenly grown disillusioned and disgusted with
-life, and the spectators, no longer to be restrained, swarmed head-long
-into the arena.  I pushed toward the animal with the rest and just as I
-paused a few feet from him he dropped suddenly dead, his blood-smeared
-horns rattling down along the barrier.
-
-On rare occasions the matador, disobeying the unwritten law that the
-animal must be despatched by a thrust down through the body, places the
-point of his sword just behind the horns and with the slightest of
-thrusts kills the bull so suddenly that his fall sounds like the thump
-of a barrel dropped from a height.  Then does the spectator, the
-unseasoned at least, experience an indefinable depression as if this
-striking of a great brute dead by a mere prick in the back of the neck
-were a warning of how frail after all is the hold of the most robust on
-life.
-
-As we poured out of the plaza, I halted in the long curving chamber
-beneath the tribunes. Twenty-two horses, gaunt, mutilated things, lay
-tumbled pellmell together in a vast heap.  Brawny men in sleeveless
-shirts were pawing them over. Whenever they brought to light a mane or
-tail they slashed off the hair and stuffed it into sacks; when they
-dragged forth a hoof the shoe was quickly added to the heap of old iron
-in a corner.  The bulls were treated with far more deference.  Each lay
-in his own space, and the group gathered about him wore the respectful
-mien of soldiers viewing the last remains of some formidable fallen
-enemy.  On my heels arrived the jingling mules with the last victim. Two
-butchers skinned, quartered, and loaded this into a wagon from the
-central markets in exactly eleven minutes, the vehicle rattled away, and
-the week's córrida was over.
-
-The Spanish torero is all but idolized by the rank and file, being in
-this respect vastly above our professional ball players.  There is
-little society except the purely bluestocking to which he has not the
-entrée; wherever and whenever he appears he is sure to be surrounded or
-followed by admiring crowds. The famous, the Bombita family, for
-example, which has given four renowned matadores to the ring--and one to
-each of my Sevillian córridas--Machaquito of Córdoba, and a half-dozen
-others of highest rank are distinctly more popular and honored than the
-king.  Nor is this popularity, however clouded by a bad thrust,
-transient or fleeting.  Pepete, who departed this life with exceeding
-suddenness back in the sixties because a bull bounded after him over the
-tablas and nailed him to the inner barrier, is to this day almost a
-national hero.
-
-Of course every red-blooded Spanish boy dreams of becoming a bullfighter
-and would not think of being unfamiliar with the features, history,
-peculiarities, and batting av--I mean number of _cogidas_ or wounds of
-the principal fighters.  Rare the boy who does not carry about his
-person a pack of portraits of matadores such as are given away with
-cigarettes. On the playground no other game at all rivals "torero" in
-popularity.  There is something distinctly redolent of the baseball
-diamond in the dialogues one is sure to hear several times on the way
-home after a córrida.  A boy whom fate or the despotism of the family
-woodpile has deprived of the joys of the afternoon, greets his inhuman
-father outside the gates with a shout of, "Hóla!  Papa! Qué tal los
-toros?--How goes it with the bulls--what is the score?"  To which
-father, anxious now to regain his popularity, answers jovially, "Bueno,
-chiquillo!  Tres cogidas y dos al hospital.--Fine, son!  Three wounded
-and two in the hospital."
-
-Having thus trod the very boards of the last act of "Carmen" and passed
-a splendid setting for the third in my tramp through the Sierra de
-Ronda, I decided to celebrate the otherwise unglorious Fourth by
-visiting the scene of the third.  The great government Fábrica de
-Tabacos of Seville is one of the most massive buildings in Spain, and
-furnishes well-nigh half the cigarettes and cigars smoked in Andalusia.
-I passed through the outer offices and crossed the vast patio without
-interference.  When I attempted to enter the factory itself, however, an
-official barred the way.  I asked why permission was denied and with a
-wink he answered:
-
-"Sh!  Hace calor.  It is hot, and las cigarreras are not dressed to
-receive visitors.  Come in the autumn and I shall make it a pleasure to
-show you through the fabrica."
-
-"But surely," I protested, "there are men among the employees who have
-admittance to the workrooms even in summer?"
-
-"Claro, hombre!" he replied, with another wink. "But that is one of the
-privileges of our trade."
-
-I strolled out around the building.  Back of it, sure enough, was a
-cavalry barracks, and any one of a score of young troopers sitting
-astride chairs in the shade of the building might have passed for Don
-José.  Some of them were singing, too, in good clear voices; though
-rather a sort of dreamy _malagüeño_ than the vivacious music of Bizet.
-But, alas!  With Don Josés and to spare, when the factory gates opened
-and the thousands of _cigarreras_ so famed in song and impropriety
-poured forth, not one was there who could by any stretch of the
-imagination be cast for Carmencita.  Sevillanas there were of every age,
-from three-foot childhood upward; disheveled gypsy girls from Triana
-across the river; fat, dumpy majas; hobbling old witches; slatterns with
-an infant tucked under one arm; crippled martyrs of modern invention;
-hollow-chested victims of tobacco fumes; painted _sinvergüenzas_; above
-all, hundreds of hale, honest women who looked as if they worked to help
-support their families and lived life seriously and not wantonly.  But
-not a face or even a form that could have seduced any young recruit to
-betray his trust and ruin his career.  Fiction, frequently, is more
-picturesque than fact--and far less pleasing in its morality.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER VI
-
-                           TRAMPING NORTHWARD
-
-
-To the man who will travel cheaply, interlarding his walking trips with
-such journeys by train as may be necessary to cover the peninsula in one
-summer, Spain offers the advantages of the "billete kilométrico."  The
-kilometer ticket is sold in all classes and for almost any distance, and
-is valid on all but a few branch lines.  One applies at a ticket agency,
-leaves a small photograph of one's self, and comes back a couple of days
-later to receive a sort of 16mo mileage-book containing legal
-information sufficient to furnish reading matter for spare moments for a
-week to come and adorned with the interesting likeness already noted.
-
-I made such application during my second week in Seville, and received
-for my pains a book good for two thousand kilometers (1280 miles) of
-third-class travel during the ensuing three months.  The cost
-thereof--besides the infelicity of sitting to a photographer in a sadly
-mosquito-bitten condition--covering transportation, government tax on
-the same, printing and the tax therefor, the photograph and the tax for
-that privilege, and the government stamp attesting that the government
-was satisfied it could tax no more, footed up to seventy-five pesetas,
-or concisely, thirteen dollars and thirty cents.
-
-But--if there is anything in official Spain that has not a "but"
-attached it should be preserved in a museum--but, I say, the
-kilometer-coupons are printed in fives rather than in ones, and however
-small the fraction of distance overlapping, it costs five kilometers of
-ticket.  Moreover--there is usually also a "moreover" following the
-"but" clause in Spanish ordinances--moreover, there are hardly two
-cities in Spain the railway distance between which does not terminate in
-the figures one or six.  It does not seem reasonable to believe that the
-railroads were surveyed round-about to accomplish this result; it must
-be, therefore, that in the hands of Spanish railway measurers the
-kilometer is susceptible to such shrinkage as may be needful. At any
-rate--and this is the thought I had hoped to lead up to--at any rate it
-was very often possible, by walking six or eleven or sixteen kilometers,
-to save ten or fifteen or twenty kilometers of ticket; and the game of
-thus outwitting the railway strategists was incomparably more diverting
-than either solitaire or one-hand poker.
-
-Thus it was that, though I planned to reach Córdoba that evening, I left
-Seville during the morning of July 8 on foot.  In my knapsack was a
-day's supply of both food and drink, in the form of three-cent's worth
-of those fresh figs that abound in Spain--the one fruit that is
-certainly descended directly from the Garden of Eden.  For miles the
-route led across a desert-dry land as flat as a western prairie,
-grilling in the blazing sunshine.  At rare intervals an olive-tree cast
-a dense black shadow. There was no grass to be seen, but only an
-occasional tuft of bright red flowers smiling bravely above the
-moistureless soil.
-
-Long hours the retrospect of the city of toreros remained, the overgrown
-cathedral bulking gigantic above all else.  All the day through
-cream-white Carmona on her hilltop--a lofty island in a sea turned
-sand--gleamed off to the southward, visible almost in detail through the
-truly transparent air of Andalusia.  I did not go to Carmona, near as
-she is to Seville; I never care to, for certainly she cannot be half so
-bewitching in reality as she looks on her sheer-faced rock across these
-burning plains of sand.  To the north, beyond the brown Guadalquivir,
-lay the distance-blue foothills of the Sierra Morena, dying away in the
-northern horizon.
-
-It was twenty-one o'clock by her station timepiece when I descended at
-Córdoba from the train I had boarded in the dusk at Tocina.  A mile's
-stroll brought me to the city itself, and a lodging. Poor old Córdoba
-has fallen on parlous times. Like those scions of nobility one runs
-across now and then "on the road," it is well that she has her papers to
-prove she was once what she claims to have been.  Surely none would
-guess her to-day a former imperial city of the Caliphs, the Bagdad and
-Mecca of the West.  Her streets, or rather her alleys, for she has no
-streets, are bordered for the most part by veritable village hovels.
-Most African in aspect of all the cities of Spain, this once center of
-Arabic civilization looks as if she had been overwhelmed so often that
-she has utterly lost heart and given up, expending what little sporadic
-energy she has left in constructing a tolerable Alameda to the station,
-either that she may have always open an avenue of escape, or to entice
-the unsuspecting traveler into her misery.
-
-To the imagination the Córdoba of to-day is wholly a deception.  Yet she
-may rest assured that she will not be entirely forgotten so long as her
-one lion, the cathedral, or more properly her chief mosque, remains.
-For in spite of Christian desecration, in spite of the crippled old
-women who are incessantly drawing water in its Patio of the
-Orange-trees, despite even the flabby, cynical priests that loaf in the
-shade of the same, smoking their cigarettes, and the beggars at its
-doors like running sores on the landscape, the Mesdjid al-Dijâmi of
-Córdoba does not, like many a far-heralded "sight," bring
-disappointment.  Once in the cool stillness of its forest of pillars one
-may still drift back into the gone centuries and rebuild and repeople in
-fancy the sumptuous days of the Moor.
-
-This reconstruction of the past was not uninterrupted, however, on the
-morning of my visit.  For in the church, that heavy-featured intruder
-within the mosque like a toadstool that has sprung up through some
-broken old Etruscan vase, mass was celebrating. I crossed before the
-open door and glanced in. Some thirty strapping, well-fed priests were
-lounging in the richly-carved choir stalls, chanting a resonant wail
-that was of vast solace, no doubt, to some unhappy soul writhing in
-purgatory.  There was not the shadow of a worshiper in the building. Yet
-these able-bodied and ostensibly sane men croaked on through their
-chants as serious-featured as if all the congregation of Córdoba were
-following their every syllable with reverent awe.
-
-They interfered not in the least with sight-seeing, however, being, as I
-have said, in the church proper, an edifice wholly distinct from the
-mosque and one which none but a conscientious tourist or a fervent
-Catholic would care to enter.  There were, nevertheless, certain
-annoyances, in the persons of a half-dozen blearing crones and as many
-ragged and officious urchins, who crowded about offering, nay, thrusting
-upon me their services as guides.
-
-In time I shook off all but one ugly fellow of about fifteen, who hung
-irrepressibly on my heels. Mass ended soon after, and the priests filed
-out into the mosque chatting and rolling cigarettes, and wandered
-gradually away.  One of them, however, catching sight of me, advanced
-and clutching my would-be guide by the slacker portions of his raiment,
-sent him spinning toward the door.
-
-"Es medio loco, eso," he said, stepping forward with a shifty smile and
-nudging me with an elbow, "a half-witted fellow who will trouble you no
-more. With your permission I will show you all that is to be seen, and
-it shall cost you nothing."
-
-I accepted the offer, not because any guidance was necessary, or even
-desirable, but glad of every opportunity for closer acquaintance and
-observation of that most disparaged class of Spanish society. To one to
-whom not only all creeds, but each of the world's half-dozen real
-religions sum up to much the same total, the general condemnation of the
-priesthood of Spain had hitherto seemed but another example of
-prejudice.
-
-This member of the order was a man of forty, stoop-shouldered, his
-tonsure merging into a frontal baldness, with the face and manners of a
-man-about-town and a frequenter of the Tenderloin.  For three sentences,
-perhaps, he conversed as any pleasant man of the world might with a
-stranger.  Then we paused to view several paintings of the Virgin. They
-were images deeply revered by all true Catholics, yet this smirking
-fellow began suddenly to comment on them in a string of lascivious
-indecencies which even I, who have no reverence for them whatever, could
-not hear without being moved to protest. As we advanced, his sallies and
-anecdotes grew more and more obscene, his conduct more insinuating. When
-he fell to hinting that I should, in return for his kindness, bring
-forward a few tales of a similar vintage, I professed myself sated with
-sight-seeing and, leading the way out into the sunshine to the stone
-terrace overlooking the Guadalquivir, with scanty excuse left him.
-
-A walk across the stately old bridge and around the century-crumbled
-city walls lightened my spirits. In the afternoon, cutting short my
-siesta, I ventured back to the cathedral.  The hour was well chosen; not
-another human being was within its walls.  Unattended I entered the
-famous third _mihrab_ and satisfied myself that its marble floor is
-really worn trough-like by the knees of pious Mohammedans, centuries
-since departed for whatever was in store for them in the realm of
-_houris_.  Free from the prattle of "guides," I climbed an improvised
-ladder into the second mihrab, which was undergoing repairs; and for a
-full two hours wandered undisturbed in the pillared solitude.
-
-Night had fallen when I set out on foot from Córdoba.  The heat was too
-intense to have permitted sleep until towards morning, had I remained.
-Over the city behind, in the last glow of evening, there seemed to rise
-again the melancholy chant, ages dead, of the muezzin:
-
-"Allah hû Allah!  There is no God but God. Come to prayer.  Allah ill
-Allah!"
-
-The moon was absent, but the stars that looked down upon the steaming
-earth seemed more brilliant and myriad than ever before.  In spite of
-them the darkness was profound.  The Spaniard, however, is still too
-near akin to the Arab to be wandering in the open country at such an
-hour, and I heard not a sound but my own footsteps and the restless
-repose of the summer night until, in the first hour of the morning, I
-arrived at the solitary station of Arcoléa.
-
-There I stretched out on a narrow platform bench, but was still gazing
-sleeplessly at the sky above when a "mixto" rolled in at two-thirty.
-The populous third-class compartment was open at the sides, and the
-movement of the train, together with the chill that comes at this hour
-even in Spain, made the temperature distinctly cold.  That of itself
-would have been endurable.  But close beside me, oppressively close in
-fact, sat a woman to the leeward of forty, of the general form of a sack
-of wheat, in her hand the omnipresent fan.  Regularly at two-minute
-intervals she flung this open from force of habit, sent over me several
-icy draughts of air, and noting the time and place, heaved a vast "ay de
-mi!" and dropped the fan shut again--for exactly another two minutes.
-
-I slept not at all and, descending as the night was fading at the
-station of Espeluy, shouldered my bundle and set off toward the sunrise.
-Three kilometers more and there lay before me the great open highway to
-Madrid, three hundred and seven kilometers away.  I struck into it
-boldly, for all my drowsiness, reflecting that even the immortal Murillo
-had tramped it before me.
-
-The landscape lay desolate on either hand, almost haggard in the glaring
-sunshine, offering a loneliness of view that seemed all at once to stamp
-with reality those myriad tales of the land pirates of Spain.  Indeed,
-the race has not yet wholly died out. Since my arrival the peninsula had
-been ringing with the exploits of one Pernales, a bandit of the old
-caliber, who had thus far outgeneraled even that world-famous
-exterminator of brigands, the modern guardia civil.  His haunt was this
-very territory to the left of me, and not a week had passed since a band
-of travelers on this national carretera had seen fit to contribute to
-his transient larder.
-
-But his was an isolated case, a course that was sure to be soon run.
-The necessity of making one's will before undertaking a journey through
-Spain is no longer imperative.  In fact, few countries offer more safety
-to the traveler; certainly not our own. For the Spaniard is individually
-one of the most honest men on the globe, notwithstanding that
-collectively, officially he is among the most corrupt. The old Oriental
-despotism has left its mark, deep to this day; and the Spaniard of the
-masses asks himself--and not without reason--why he should show loyalty
-to a government that is little more than two parties secretly bound by
-agreement alternately to share the spoils.  Hence the law-breaker is as
-of yore not merely respected but encouraged.  Pernales in his short
-career had become already a hero and a pride of the Spanish people, a
-champion warring single-handed against the common enemy.
-
-Without pose or pretense I may say that I would gladly have given two or
-three ten-dollar checks and as many weeks of a busy life to have fallen
-into the clutches of this modern Dick Turpin.  His retreat would
-certainly have been a place of interest.  But fortune did not favor, and
-I passed unmolested the long, hot stretch to the stony hilltop village
-of Bailen, a name almost better known to Frenchmen than to Spaniards.
-
-There, however, I was waylaid.  I had finished a lunch of all that the
-single grocery-store offered, which chanced to be stone-hard cheese and
-water, and was setting out again, when two civil guards gruffly demanded
-my papers.  This was the only pair I was destined to meet whose manners
-were not in the highest degree polished.  The screaming heat was,
-perhaps, to blame.  I turned aside into the shade of a building and
-handed them my passport, which they examined with the circumspection of
-a French gendarme.  In general, however, it spoke well of my choice of
-garb that I was rarely halted by the guardia as a possible vagrant nor
-yet by the officers of the octroi as a possessor of dutiable articles.
-
-It would seem the part of wisdom in tramping in southern countries to
-walk each day until toward noon and, withdrawing until the fury of the
-sun is abated, march on well into the night.  But the plan is seldom
-feasible.  In all this southern Spain especially there is scarcely a
-patch of grass large enough whereon to lay one's head, to say nothing of
-the body; and shade is rare indeed.  On this day, after a sleepless
-night, a siesta seemed imperative.  In mid-afternoon I came upon a
-culvert under the highway and lay down on the scanty, dust-dry leaves at
-its mouth, shaded to just below the arm-pits.  But sleep had I none; for
-about me swarmed flies like vultures over a field of battle, and after
-fighting them for an hour that seemed a week, I acknowledged defeat and
-trudged drowsily on.
-
-Soon began a few habitations and a country growing much wheat.  In
-nothing more than in her methods of husbandry is Spain behind--or as the
-Spaniard himself would put it--different from the rest of the world.
-Her peasantry has not reached even the flail stage of development, not
-to mention the threshing machine.  The grain is cut with sickles. As it
-arrives from the field it is spread head-down round and round a
-saucer-shaped plot of ground. Into this is introduced a team of mules
-hitched to a sled, which amble hour by hour around the enclosure,
-sometimes for days, the boy driver squatting on the cross-piece singing
-a never-ceasing Oriental drone of a few tones.  From each such
-threshing-floor the chaff, sweeping in great clouds across the
-carretera, covered me from head to foot as I passed.
-
-It was some distance beyond the town of Guarramán and at nightfall that
-I entered a village of a few houses like dug-out rocks tossed
-helter-skelter on either side of the way.  The dejected little shop
-furnished me bread, wine, and dried fish and the information that
-another of the hovels passed for a posada.  This was a single stone
-room, half floored with cobbles.  The back, unfloored section housed
-several munching asses.  The human portion was occupied by a stray
-arriero, the shuffling, crabbed old woman who kept the place, and by a
-hearty, frank-faced blind man in the early thirties, attended by a
-frolicsome boy of ten.  It was furnished with exactly four cooking
-utensils, a tumbled bundle of burlap blankets in one corner, a
-smouldering cluster of fagots in another, and one stool besides that on
-which the blind man was seated.
-
-This I took, reflecting that he who will see Spain must not expect
-luxury.  The real Spaniard lives roughly and shows himself only to those
-who are willing to rough it with him.  As I sat down, the blind man
-addressed me:
-
-"Hot days these on the road, señor."
-
-"Verdad es," I answered.
-
-"You are a foreigner from the north," he remarked casually, as if to
-himself.
-
-"Yes; but how do you know that?"
-
-"Oh, a simple matter," he replied.  "That you are a foreigner, by your
-speech.  That you are from the north, because you only half pronounce
-the letter R.  You said 'burro' in speaking of our four-legged companion
-there, whereas the word is 'bur-r-r-ro.'  You have walked many leagues."
-
-"What tells you that?"
-
-"Carajo!  Nothing simpler.  Your step is tired, you sit down heavily,
-you brush your trousers and a thick dust arises."
-
-Blindness, I had hitherto fancied, was an advantage only during certain
-histrionic moments at the opera, but here was a man who evidently made
-it a positive blessing.
-
-"Your are about twenty-five," he continued.
-
-"Twenty-six.  You will be good enough, perhaps, to tell me how you
-guessed that."
-
-"What could be easier?  The tone of your voice; the pace at which your
-words fall.  It is strange that you, a foreigner, should be such an
-amateur of bulls."
-
-"Caramba!" I gasped.  "You certainly do not learn that from the tone of
-my voice!"
-
-"Ah!  We cannot tell all our secrets," he chuckled; "we who must make a
-living by them."
-
-Then in the night that had settled down he fell to telling stories, not
-intentionally, one would have said, but unconsciously, fascinating tales
-as those of the "Arabian Nights," full of the color and the extravagance
-of the East, the twinkle of his cigarette gleaming forth from time to
-time and outlining the boy seated wide-eyed on the floor at his feet
-with his head against his master's knee.  He was as truly a minstrel as
-any troubadour that wandered in the days of chivalry, a born
-story-teller all but unconscious of his gift.  When after a long time he
-left off, we drifted again into conversation.  He was wholly illiterate
-and in compensation more filled with true knowledge and wisdom than a
-houseful of schoolmen.  His calling for five and twenty years had been
-just this of roaming about Spain telling his colorful stories.
-
-"Were you born so?" I asked late in the evening.
-
-"Even so, señor."
-
-"A sad misfortune."
-
-"You know best, señor," he answered, with a hearty laugh.  "I have no
-notion how useful this feeling you call sight may be, but with those I
-have I live with what enjoyment is reasonable and find no need for
-another."
-
-The crippled old crone, who seemed neither to have known any other life
-than this nor ever to have been attired in anything than the piece-meal
-rags that now covered her, dragged the heap of burlap from the corner
-and spread it in three sections on the stone floor.  On one she threw
-herself down with many sighs and the creaking of rusty joints, the
-second fell to my lot, and the blind man and his boy curled up on the
-third.  The arriero carried his own blanket and had long since fallen to
-snoring with his head on the saddle of his ass and his _alforjas_ close
-beside him.
-
-There is one Spanish sentence that expresses the most with the least
-breath, perhaps, of any single word on earth.  It is "Madrugáis?" and
-means nothing less than "Is it your intention to get up early to-morrow
-morning?"  In these wayside fondas it calls always for an affirmative
-answer, for the bedroom is certain to be turned into the living room and
-public hall and stable exit at the first glimmer of dawn.
-
-I was on the road again by four-thirty.  Three hours of plodding across
-a rising country brought me to La Carolina, a town as pleasing in
-comparison with its neighbors as its name.  Its customs, however, were
-truly Spanish, even though many of the ancestors of its light-haired
-populace were Swiss, and my untimely quest for breakfast did nothing
-more than arouse vast astonishment in its half-dozen cafés, wrecked and
-riotous places in charge of disheveled, heavy-eyed "skittles."  In the
-open market I found fresh figs even cheaper than in Seville and, asking
-no better fare, turned back toward the highway.
-
-I had passed through half the town when suddenly I heard in a side
-street a familiar voice, singing to the accompaniment of a guitar.  I
-turned thither and found the blind singer I had first encountered in
-Jaen, just on the point of drawing out his bundle of handbills.  While
-his wife canvassed the group of early risers, I accosted him with the
-information that I had bought one of his sheets in Jaen a month before.
-
-"Ah!  You too tramp la carretera?" he replied, turning upon me a glance
-so sharp that for the moment I forgot he could not see.
-
-"Sí, señor.  Do you not also sell the music of your songs?"
-
-"How can music be put on paper?" he laughed. "It comes as you sing.  Are
-you going far?"
-
-"To Madrid."
-
-"Vaya!" he cried, once more posing his guitar. "Well, there is much to
-be enjoyed on the road--when the sun is not too high.  Vaya V. con Dios,
-young man."
-
-Beyond Las Navas de Tolosa the face of the landscape changed, the
-carretera mounting ever higher through a soilless stretch of angular
-hills of dull-gray, slate-colored rock.  Above Santa Elena these broke
-up into deep gorges and mountain foothills, an utterly unpeopled country
-as silent as the grave. I halted to gaze across it, and all at once,
-reflecting on the stillness as of desolation that hangs over all rural
-Spain, there came upon me the recollection that in all the land I had
-not once heard the note of a wild bird.
-
-In the utter quiet I reached a deep slit in the flanking mountain, and
-even the stream, that descended along its bottom was as noiseless as
-some phantom river.  It offered all the facilities for a bath, however,
-and moreover under an overhanging mass of rock that warded off the sun
-had watered to un-Spanish greenness a patch of grass of a few feet each
-way.  There I spent half the afternoon in slumber.  The highway shortly
-after plunged headlong down into the very depths of the earth, squirmed
-for a time in the abyss, then clambered painfully upward between
-precipitous walls of gloomy slate to a new level.  When suddenly,
-unexpectedly, almost physically there rose before my eyes the picture of
-the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, ambling past, close followed by
-thickset, hale-cheeked Sancho on his ass.  For I had traversed the pass
-of Despeñaperros; languid Andalusia lay behind me, and ahead as far as
-the eye could reach spread the yet twice more barren and rocky tableland
-of La Mancha.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER VII
-
-                      SPANISH ROADS AND ROADSTERS
-
-
-In the gloom of evening I espied on a dull, sterile hillside a vast
-rambling venta, as bare, slate-colored, and marked with time as the
-hills themselves. Here was exactly such a caravansary as that in which
-he of the Triste Figura had watched over his arms by night and won his
-Micomiconian knighthood. It consisted of an immense enclosure that was
-half farmyard, backed by a great stable of which a strip around two
-sides beneath the low vaulted roof had been marked off for the use of
-man; the whole dull, gloomy, cheerless, unrelieved by a touch of color.
-Within the building were scattered a score of mules, borricos and
-machos.  Several tough-clothed muleteers, with what had been bright
-handkerchiefs wound about their brows, sauntered in the courtyard or sat
-eating with their great razor-edged navajas their lean suppers of brown
-bread and a knuckle of ham.  Even the massive wooden pump in the yard
-among an array of ponderous carts and wagons was there to complete the
-picture.  Indeed, this was none other than the Venta de Cardenas,
-reputed the very same in which Don Greaves passed his vigilant night,
-where Sancho was tossed in a blanket and Master Nicholas, the barber,
-bearded himself with a cow's tail.
-
-The chance betrayal of my nationality aroused in the arrieros a
-suggestion of wonder and even an occasional question.  But in general
-their interest was as meager as their knowledge of the world outside the
-national boundaries.  Not once did they display the eagerness to learn
-that is so characteristic of the Italian.  For the Spaniard considers it
-beneath his dignity as a caballero and a cristino viejo to show any
-marked curiosity, especially concerning a foreign land, which cannot but
-be vastly inferior to his own. Four centuries of national misfortune and
-shrinkage have by no means eradicated his firm conviction, implanted in
-his mind by Ferdinand and Isabel in the days of conquest, that he is the
-salt of the earth, superior in all things to the rest of the human race.
-
-Spain is one of the most illiterate countries of the civilized world,
-yet also one of the best educated, unless education be merely that mass
-of undigested and commonly misapplied information absorbed within four
-walls.  Few men have a more exact knowledge, a more solid footing on the
-everyday earth than the peasant, the laborer, the muleteer of Spain.
-One does not marvel merely at the fluent, powerful, entirely grammatical
-language of these unlettered fellows, but at the sound basic wisdom that
-stands forth in their every sentence.  If their illiteracy denies them
-the advantage of absorbing the festering rot of the yellow journal, in
-compensation they have a wealth of vocabulary and a forceful simplicity
-of diction that raises them many degrees above the corresponding class
-in more "advanced" lands.
-
-It is of the "lower" classes that I am speaking, the common sense and
-backbone of Spain.  The so-called upper class is one of the most truly
-ignorant and uneducated on earth--though among its members, be it noted,
-is no illiteracy.  The maltreated Miguel was adamantinely right in
-choosing his hero from the higher orders; no Spaniard of the masses
-could be so far led astray from reason as to become a Quixote.
-
-It is noticeable that the Spaniard of the laboring class has almost none
-of that subservience born in the blood in the rest of Europe.  Not only
-does each man consider himself the equal of any other; he takes and
-expects the world to take for granted that this is the case, and never
-feels called upon to demonstrate that equality to himself and the rest
-of the world by insolence and rowdyism.  Dissipation he knows not,
-except the dissipation of fresh air, sunshine, and a guitar.  Nowhere in
-Christian lands is drunkenness more rare.  Like the Arab the hardy
-lower-class Spaniard thrives robustly on a mean and scanty diet; he can
-sleep anywhere, at any time, and to the creature comforts is supremely
-indifferent.  One can hardly believe this the country in which Alfonso X
-felt it necessary to enact stern laws against the serving of more than
-two dishes of meat at a meal or the wearing of "slashed" silks.  Yet the
-Spain of to-day is not really a cheap country; it is merely that within
-its borders frugality is universal and held in honor rather than
-contempt.
-
-When the evening grew advanced, my fellow guests lay down on the bare
-cobble-stones of the venta, making pillows of the furniture of their
-mules, and were soon sleeping peacefully and sonorously.  For me,
-soft-skinned product of a more ladylike world, was spread a muleteer's
-thick blanket in the embrasure of a wooden-blinded window, and amid the
-munching of asses and the not unpleasant smell of a Spanish stable I,
-too, drifted into slumber.
-
-From dawn until early afternoon I marched on across the rocky vastness
-of Spain, where fields have no boundary nor limit, a gnarled and osseous
-country and a true despoblado, as fruitless as that sterile neck of sand
-that binds Gibraltar to the continent.  It is in these haggard,
-unpeopled plateaus of the interior that one begins to believe that the
-population of the peninsula is to-day barely one-third what it was in
-the prosperous years of Abd er-Rahman.
-
-At length, across a valley that was like a lake of heat waves, appeared
-Santa Cruz, a hard, colorless town where I was forced to be content with
-the usual bread, cheese and wine, the former as ossified as the
-surrounding countryside.  In the further outskirts of the place I found
-a potter at work in a large open hovel and halted to pass the most
-heated hour with him.  In one end of the building was a great trough of
-clay in which a bare-foot boy was slowly treading up and down.  Now and
-again he caught up a lump of the dough and deposited it on a board
-before the potter.  This the latter took by the handful and, placing it
-on his wheel, whirled it quickly into a vessel of a shape not unlike a
-soup-bowl.  I inquired what these sold for and with a sigh he replied:
-
-"Three small dogs apiece, cocidos (cooked)"--pointing at the kiln--"y
-cuantos--how many break in the glazing!  It is no joyful trade, señor."
-
-Once he left his work to munch a crust and to offer me a cigarette and a
-drink from his leather bota, but soon drifted back to his task with the
-restless, harassed look of the piece-worker the world over.  As I sat
-watching his agile fingers a bit drowsily, there came suddenly back to
-memory the almost forgotten days when I, too, had toiled thus in the
-gloomy, sweltering depths of a factory.  Truer slavery there never was
-than that of the piece-worker under our modern division of labor.
-Stroll through a factory to find a man seated at a machine stamping
-strips of tin into canheads at two cents a hundred by a few simple turns
-of the wrist, and his task seems easy, almost a pastime in its
-simplicity.  But go away for a year, travel through half the countries
-of the globe, go on a honeymoon to Venice and the Grecian isles, and
-then come back to find him sitting on the self-same stool, in the
-self-same attitude, stamping strips of tin into canheads at two cents a
-hundred by a few simple turns of the wrist.
-
-Three blazing hours passed by, and I found myself entering a rolling
-land of vineyards, heralding wine-famous Valdepeñas.  The vines were low
-shrubs not trained on sticks, the grapes touching the ground. A dip in
-an exotic stream reduced the grime and sweat of travel, and just beyond
-I came again upon the railway.  A half-hour along it brought me face to
-face with the first foreign tramp I had met in Spain,--a light-haired,
-muscular youth in tattered, sun-brown garb, his hob-nailed shoes swung
-over one shoulder and around his feet thick bandages of burlap.  He was
-a German certainly, perhaps a modern Benedict Moll whose story would
-have been equally interesting in its absurdity.  But he passed me with
-the stare of a man absorbed in his personal affairs and accustomed to
-keep his own counsel, and stalked away southward along the scintillant
-railroad.
-
-I halted for a drink at the stuccoed dwelling of a track-walker.  In the
-grassless yard, under the only imitation of a tree in the neighborhood,
-slept a roadster.  Now and again the chickens that scratched in vain the
-dry, lifeless earth about him, marched disconsolately across his
-prostrate form.
-
-"Poor fellow," said the track-walker's wife at the well, "he has known
-misery, more even than the rest of us.  Vaya como duerme!"
-
-I sat down in the streak of shade that was crawling eastward across him.
-He wore a ten-day beard and the garb of a Spanish workman of the city,
-set off by a broad red faja around his waist.  In one bulging pocket of
-his coat appeared to be all his earthly possessions.
-
-There was no evidence of overwhelming "miseria" in the cheery greeting
-with which he awoke, and as our ways coincided we continued in company.
-He was a Sevillian named Jesús, bound northward in general and wherever
-else the gods might lead him.
-
-"For a long time there has been no work in Seville for nosotros, the
-carpenters," he explained, though with no indication of grief.  "This
-half year I have been selling apricots and azucarillos in the bullring
-and on the Alameda.  But each day more of Seville comes to sell and less
-to buy.  I should have gone away long ago, but my comrade Gáspare would
-not leave his amiga.  Gásparo is a stone-polisher and had work.
-
-"Then one day I am taken by the police for I know not what.  When after
-two weeks I come out, Gásparo is gone.  But he has come north and
-somewhere I shall run across him."
-
-Jesús had just passed through a marvelous experience, which he proceeded
-to relate in all his Latin wealth of language--though not in the
-phraseology, of a graduate roadster:
-
-"Mira V., hombre!  Two nights ago, when my feet are worn away with more
-than ten leguas of walking on the railroad, I come to Baeza.  It is
-dark, and I wander along the track to find a soft bank to sleep.  On the
-short railroad that is at each station there is waiting a train of
-merchandise.  Suddenly a great idea comes to me.  'Sh!  Jesús,' I
-whisper, 'what if you should hide yourself away somewhere on this train
-of merchandise?  It would perhaps bring you to the next station.'
-
-"With great quiet I climb a wagon and hide myself between bales of cork.
-Screech!  Brrr! Rboom!  The train is off, and all night I am
-riding--without a ticket.  But at Vilches the man that goes with the
-train with a lantern comes by and it is my curse to be making some
-noise, moving to roll a cigarette.  'Ya te 'pia!' (I spy you!) he cries.
-Vaca que soy!  So of course I must get down.  But mira, hombre!  There I
-have traveled more than twelve miles without paying a perrito!"
-
-I had not the heart to disillusion him with a yarn or two from the land
-of the "hobo."
-
-In the telling we had come within sight of Valdepeñas.  It was a "valley
-of rocks" indeed, though a city of good size and considerable evidence
-of industry, abounding with great _bodegas_, or wine warehouses.  As we
-trudged through the long straight street that had swallowed up the
-highway, we passed the _taller_ of a marble-cutter.
-
-"It is in a place like this that Gásparo works," sighed Jesús, wandering
-languidly in at the open door.  I was strolling slowly on when a whoop
-as of a man suddenly beset by a band of savages brought me running back
-into the establishment.  Jesús was shaking wildly by both hands a
-stockily-built young fellow in shirt sleeves and white canvas apron, who
-was rivaling him in volubility of greeting.  Gásparo was found.
-
-Still shouting incoherently, the two left the shop and squatted in the
-shade along the outside wall.
-
-"Hombre!" panted Jesús, when his excitement had somewhat died down.  "I
-have told myself that by to-morrow we should be tramping the carretera
-together."
-
-But Gásparo shook his head, sadly yet decisively.
-
-"No, amigo.  Jamás!  Nunca!  Never do I take to the road again.  I have
-here a good job, the finest of patrons.  No.  I shall stay, and send for
-the amiga--or find another here."
-
-With the dignity of a caballero, Jesús accepted the decree without
-protest, and wished his erstwhile comrade luck and prosperity.  Then
-that they might part in full knowledge, he launched forth in the story
-of his journey from Seville.  Gásparo listened absently, shaking his
-head sadly from time to time. When the episode of the amateur hoboing
-began, he sat up with renewed interest; before it was ended he was
-staring at the speaker with clenched fists, his eyes bulging, the
-cigarette between his lips stone-dead.  From that great epic Jesús
-jumped without intermission to a hasty survey of the anticipated joys
-that lay between him and Madrid.  Suddenly Gásparo sprang into the air
-with an explosive howl, landing on his feet.
-
-"By the blood of your namesake!" he shouted. "How can a man stay always
-in one place?  This daily drudgery will kill me!  I will throw the job
-in the patron's face, and get my wages this very minute, amaguito, and
-we will go to Madrid together.  Jesús Maria!  Who knows but we can hide
-ourselves on another freight train!"--and crying over his shoulder some
-rendezvous, he disappeared within the establishment.
-
-We sauntered on to the central plaza.  It was utterly treeless and paved
-with cobble-stones; nor could we find a patch of grass or a shaded bench
-in all the neighborhood.
-
-"Look here, señor!" cried Jesús, suddenly rushing toward a policeman who
-was loitering in the shade of a bodega.  "Don't you have any parks or
-Alamedas in this val de penas of yours?  You call this a city!"
-
-"Señor," replied the officer in the most apologetic of voices, "we are
-not a rich city, and the rain so seldom falls in La Mancha.  I am very
-sorry," and touching a finger respectfully to his cap, he strolled
-slowly on.
-
-Though the sun was low it was still wiltingly hot in the stony streets.
-Jesús, as I knew, was penniless. I suggested therefore that I would
-willingly pay the score of two for the privilege of retreating to the
-coolness of a wineshop.
-
-"Bueno!" cried the Sevillian.  "The wine of Valdepeñas is without equal,
-and of the cheapest--if you know where to buy.  Vámonos, hombre!"
-
-He led the way down the street and by some Castilian instinct into a
-tiny underground shop that was ostensibly given over to the sale of
-charcoal.  The smudged old keeper motioned us to the short rickety bench
-on which he had been dreaming away the afternoon and, descending still
-lower by a dark hole in the floor, soon set before us a brown glazed
-pitcher holding a _quarto_--about a quart--of wine, for which I paid him
-approximately three and a half cents.
-
-In all western Europe I have drunk the common table wine in whatever
-quantity it has pleased me, and suffered from it always the same effect
-as from so much clear water.  It may be that the long tramp under a
-scorching sun and the distance from my last meal-place altered
-conditions.  Certainly there was no need of the seller's assurance that
-this was genuine "valdepeñas" and that what had been sold us elsewhere
-as such was atrociously adulterated.  Before the pitcher was half empty,
-I noted with wonder that I was taking an extraordinary interest in the
-old man's phillipic against the government and its exorbitant tax on
-wine.  Jesús, too, grew in animation, and when the subterranean
-Demosthenes ended with a thundering, "Sí, señores!  If it wasn't for the
-cursed government you and I could drink just such wine as this pure
-valdepenas anywhere as if it was water!"  I was startled to hear us both
-applaud loud and long. A scant four-cents' worth had seemed so
-parsimonious a treat for two full-thirsted men that I had intended to
-order in due time a second pitcherful.  But this strange mirth seemed
-worthy of investigation.  I sipped the last of my portion and made no
-movement to suggest a replenishing.  A few minutes later the old man had
-bade us go with the Almighty, and we were strolling away arm in arm.
-
-The sun was setting when we reached the plaza. We sat down on the
-cathedral steps.  The Sevillian had suddenly an unaccountable desire to
-sing.  He struck up one of the Moorish-descended ballads of his native
-city.  To my increasing astonishment I found myself joining in.  Not
-only that, but for the first and last time of my existence I caught the
-real Andalusian rhythm.  An appreciative audience of urchins gathered.
-Then the sacristan stepped out and politely invited us to choose some
-other stage.
-
-Across the square was a casa de comidas.  We entered and ordered dinner.
-The señora served us about one-third of what the bill-of-fare promised,
-and demanded full price--something that had never before happened in all
-my Spanish experience.  I protested vociferously--another wholly
-unprecedented proceeding.  The policeman who had apologized for the
-absence of parks sauntered in, and I laid the case before him.  The
-señora restated it still more noisily.  I declared I would not pay more
-than one peseta.  The lady took oath that I would pay two.  The
-policeman requested me to comply with her demand.  I refused to the
-extent of commanding him to take his hand off the hilt of his sword.  He
-apologized and suggested that we split the difference. This seemed
-reasonable.  I paid it, and we left. Dark night had settled down.  We
-marched aimlessly away into it.  Somewhere Gásparo fell in with us.
-Somewhere else, on the edge of the city, we came upon a heap of bright
-clean straw on a threshing floor, and fell asleep.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER VIII
-
-                        ON THE ROAD IN LA MANCHA
-
-
-It was Sunday morning, the market day of Valdepeñas, when I returned
-alone to stock my knapsack.  The plaza that had been so deserted and
-peaceful the evening before was packed from casa de comidas to cathedral
-steps with canvas booths in which the peasants of the encircling country
-were selling all the products of La Mancha, and among which circulated
-all the housewives of Valdepeñas, basket on arm.  The women of the
-smaller cities of Spain cling stoutly to their local costumes, aping not
-in the least the world of fashion.  These of Valdepeñas were strikingly
-different from the Andalusians, considering how slight the distance that
-separates them from that province.  They were almost German in their
-slowness, with hardly a suggestion of "sal"; a solemn, bronze-tanned
-multitude who, parting their hair in the middle and combing it tight and
-smooth, much resembled Indian squaws.
-
-From the northern edge of the city the highway ran straight as the
-flight of a crow to where it was lost in a flat, colorless horizon.  The
-land was artificially irrigated.  The first place I stopped for water
-was a field in which an old man was driving round and round a
-blind-folded burro hitched to a noria, a water-wheel that was an exact
-replica of the Egyptian _sakka_, even to its squawk, jars of Andújar
-being tied to the endless chain with leather thongs.  The man, too, had
-that dreamy, listless air of the Egyptian _fellah_; had I had a kodak to
-turn upon him I should have expected him to run after me crying for
-"backsheesh."
-
-Ahead stretched long vistas of low vineyards.  The only buildings along
-the way were an occasional bare uniform stone dwelling of a _peon
-caminero_, or government road-tender.  At one of these I halted to
-quench my thirst, and the occupant, smoking in Sabbath ease before it,
-instantly pronounced me a "norte americano."  I showed my astonishment,
-for hardly once before in the peninsula had I been taken for other than
-a Frenchman, or a Spaniard from some distant province.
-
-The peon's unusual perspicacity was soon explained; he had been a
-soldier in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.  I readily led him into
-reminiscences.  Throughout the war, he stated, he had fought like a
-hero, not because he was of that rare breed but because every member of
-the troop had been filled with the belief that once captured by "los
-yanquis" he would be hanged on the spot.
-
-"And are you still of the opinion?" I asked.
-
-"Qué barbaridad!" he laughed.  "I was taken at Santiago and carried a
-prisoner to your country. What a people!  A whole meal at breakfast!  We
-lived as never before, or since.
-
-"You were quite right, vosotros, to take the island.  I do not blame
-you.  It was competición, just competition, like two shop-keepers in the
-city.  I am glad the miserable government lost their Cuba."
-
-So often did I hear exactly this view from Spaniards of the laboring
-class that it may be considered typical of their attitude toward the
-late disagreement. The strange question has often been asked whether it
-is safe so soon after the war for a North American to travel alone in
-the interior of Spain.  For answer we have only to ask ourselves whether
-a Spaniard traveling alone in the interior of the United States would be
-in any imminent danger of having his throat cut--even had we been
-defeated.  In Spain there is vastly less, for not only is the Spaniard
-quicker to forgive and far less belligerent than he is commonly fancied,
-but there exists in the peninsula not one-tenth the rowdyism and hoodlum
-"patriotism" of our own country.
-
-I stayed long and left with difficulty.  Gregarious is man, and on
-Sunday, when all the world about him is at rest, even the pedestrian
-finds it hard to exert himself.  A league beyond I came upon the
-Sevillians lolling in the shadow of another isolated peon dwelling in
-what seemed once to have been a village.
-
-Jesús in his eleven-day beard hailed me from afar; moreover, the Sunday
-languor was still upon me.  I stretched out with them in the shade of
-the building, but the flies prevented us from sleeping.  We crawled into
-a peasant's cart under the shed--but the flies quickly found us out.  We
-crossed the road to the ruin of a church, split almost exactly through
-the middle of tower and all, and one side fallen.  Within it was a
-grassy corner where the sun never fell, and even a bit of breeze fanned
-us.  But the flies had made this their Spanish headquarters.  We decided
-to go on.
-
-In that only were we unanimous, for the Sevillians wished to follow the
-railroad, a furlong away, and I the carretera.  I had all but won them
-over when a freight train labored by.
-
-"Ay!  Ay!  Los toros!" shouted the two in chorus.
-
-"Where?" I asked, seeing no such animals in sight.
-
-"En las jaulas, hombre!  In the cages!" cried Jesús, pointing to a
-flat-car on which, set close together, were six tightly-closed boxes
-each just large enough to hold a bull.
-
-"We go by the railroad!" shouted Gásparo, decisively.  "Alma de Dios!
-Who knows but we may be able to hide ourselves on a train that is
-carrying toros to the córrida!"
-
-We separated, therefore, and struck northward, though we marched side by
-side within hailing distance until we were all three swallowed up in the
-city of Manzanares.
-
-The bare-faced, truly Manchegan town was half-deserted, though the
-reason therefor was not hard to guess, for the bullring in the outskirts
-was howling as I passed.  For all its size the place did not seem to
-boast an eating-house of any description.  At last I halted before an
-old man seated in a shaded corner of the plaza, to inquire:
-
-"Señor, what does a stranger in your town do when he would eat?"
-
-"Vaya, señor!" he replied, with the placid deliberation of age, and
-pointing with his cane to the shops that bordered the square.  "He buys
-a perrito of bread in the bakery there, dos perros of ham in the
-butchery beyond, fruit of the market-woman--"
-
-"And eats it where?" I interrupted.
-
-"Hi jo de mi alma!" responded the patriarch with extreme slowness and
-almost a touch of sarcasm in his voice.  "Here is the broad plaza, all
-but empty.  In all that is there not room to sit down and eat?"
-
-I continued my quest and entered two posadas. But for the only time
-during the summer the proprietors demanded my _cédula personal_.  I
-explained that Americans are not supplied with these government licenses
-to live, and showed instead my passport. Both landlords protested that
-it was not in Spanish and refused to admit me.  One might have fancied
-one's self in Germany.  It was some time after dark that I was directed
-to a private boarding-house that almost rewarded my long search.  For
-the supper set before me was equal to a five-course repast in the Casa
-Robledo of Granada, and for the first time since leaving Seville I slept
-in a bed, and not in my clothes.
-
-In the morning an absolutely straight road lay before me across a land
-treeless but for a few stunted shrubs, a face of desolation and aridity
-and solitude as of Asia Minor.  From the eastward swept a hot, dry wind
-across the baked plains of La Mancha that recalled all too forcibly the
-derivation of its name from the Arabic _manxa_--a moistureless land.
-
-At fifteen kilometers the highway swerved slightly and lost from view
-for the first time the immense cathedral of Manzanares behind.  On
-either hand, miles visible in every direction, huddled stone towns on
-bare hillsides and in rocky vales, each inconspicuous but for its vast
-overtowering church.  "Si la demeure des hommes est pauvre, celle de
-Dieu est riche," charges colorful Gautier; which, if the church of Spain
-is truly the "demeure de Dieu," is sternly true.  City, town, village,
-hamlet, a church always bulks vast above it like a hen among her
-chicks--rather like some violent overpowering tyrant with a club.  To
-the right of the turn one might, but for a slight rise of ground, have
-espied a bare twelve kilometers away immortal Argamasilla itself.
-
-During the day there developed a hole in my shoe, through a sole of
-those very "custom-made" oxfords warranted by all the eloquent Broadway
-salesman held sacred--whatever that may have been--to endure at least
-six months of the hardest possible wear.  Sand and pebbles drifted in,
-as sand and pebbles will the world over under such circumstances, and
-for some days to come walking was not of the smoothest.
-
-Almost exactly at noonday I caught sight of the first windmills of La
-Mancha, three of them slowly toiling together on a curving hillside, too
-distinctly visible at this hour to be mistaken by the most romance-mad
-for giants.  The few peasants I fell in with now and then were a more
-placid, somber people than the Andaluz and, as is commonly the case in
-villages reached by no railway, more courteous to the roadster than
-their fellows more directly in touch with the wide world.
-
-It was that hour when the sun halts lingering above the edge of the
-earth, as if loath to leave it, that I entered the noiseless little
-hamlet of Puerto Lápiche.  It contained no public hostelry, but the
-woman who kept its single shop cooked me a supper, chiefly of fried
-eggs, which I ate sitting on a stool before the building.  The fried
-eggs of Spain! Wherein their preparation differs from that in other
-lands I know not, but he who has never eaten them after a long day's
-tramp cannot guess to what Epicurean heights fried eggs may rise.  How,
-knowing of them, could Sancho have named cow-heel for his choice?
-
-The evening was of that soft and gentle texture that invites openly to a
-night out-of-doors.  On the edge of the open country beyond, too, was a
-threshing-floor heaped with new straw that would certainly have been my
-choice, had not the village guardia been watching my every movement from
-across the way.  When I had returned the porcelain frying-pan to its
-owner, I strolled boldly across to the officer and inquired for a
-lodging.
-
-"With regret, señor," he replied, raising his hat and offering me the
-stool on which he had been seated, "I am forced to say that we are a
-small village so rarely honored by the presence of travelers that we
-have no public house.  But--" he hesitated a moment, then went on "--the
-weather is fine, señor; the night is warm, the pure air hurts no one;
-why do you not make your bed on the soft, clean straw of the
-threshing-floor yonder?"
-
-"Caballero," I responded, with my most Spanish salute, "a thousand
-thanks--and may your grace remain with God."
-
-For the first time during my journey the heat was tempered next morning,
-though by no means routed, by a slightly overcast sky.  The wind
-continued. The highway led on through a seared brown country, for the
-most part a silent, smokeless, unpeopled land. The windmills of La
-Mancha were numerous now on either hand as the road sank slowly down to
-a gap in the low, gaunt mountains of Ciudad Real.  At last it reached
-them and, picking its way through the narrow pass of Lápiche, strode off
-again across a still hotter, drier region, unmitigated even by the wind,
-which had stopped short at the mountain barrier--a land flowing not even
-with ditch-water.  I halted but briefly at the large village of
-Madridejos, peopled by a slow, dreamy-eyed, yet toil-calloused
-peasantry, as if their world of fancy and the hard stony life of reality
-never quite joined hands.
-
-Hot, thirsty and hungry, I came in mid-afternoon to an isolated
-ramshackle venta in a rocky wilderness.  An enormous shaggy man of a
-zoölogical cast of countenance, and a male-limbed girl were harnessing
-mules in the yard.  No other living thing showed itself.  I offered a
-peseta for food.  The man glared at me for a time in silence, then
-growled that he sold nothing, but that I should find a posada not far
-beyond.  He was evidently the champion prevaricator of that region, for
-not the suggestion of a hovel appeared during the rest of the afternoon.
-But he would be a fellow with Sancho indeed, who could not overrule a
-few hour's appetite in thinking of higher things, and no fit traveler in
-this hard, toilsome land where overeating is not numbered among the
-vices.
-
-The setting of the sun was perhaps an hour off when the highway,
-swinging a bit to the left and surmounting a barren, rocky ridge, laid
-suddenly before me an enthralling prospect.  Below, far down on a
-distinctly lower level, a flat, ruffled country still misty with rising
-waves of heat, stretched away to the uttermost endless distance.  The
-whole, glinting in the oblique rays of the setting sun, was scored in
-every direction with dull rock villages huddled compactly together,
-while on every hand, like signal fires on a western prairie, rose from a
-hundred threshing-floors columns of chaff straight and slender into the
-motionless air to an incredible height before breaking up.  The road
-descended with decision, yet in no unseemly haste and, marching for an
-hour across a country traveled only by an occasional donkey loaded with
-chopped straw, led me at nightfall into the scene of Sancho's labors in
-the wheat-piles--the village of Tembleque.
-
-In its immense fonda, but for the underground stables one single, vast,
-cobble-paved room, a vacant-eyed old man, a girl, and a leviathan of a
-woman sat among the carts, wine-casks, and heaps of harnesses, the
-latter knitting.  In strictest Castilian the establishment was no fonda,
-but a _parador_, from _parar_, to stop; and certainly it could not with
-honesty have laid claim to any more inviting name, for assuredly no man
-in his senses would have dreamed of choosing it as a _staying_-place.
-When I asked if lodging was to be had, the woman replied with a caustic
-sneer that she had always been able thus far to accommodate any who were
-able and willing to pay.
-
-"And can one also get supper?" I inquired timorously.
-
-"How on earth do I know?" snapped the woman.
-
-I stared with a puzzled air at the old man and he in like manner at the
-knitter, who turned out to be his wife, espoused in budding maidenhood
-when his march in life had well begun.
-
-"How can I cook him supper if he has none with him?" snarled the no
-longer maidenly.
-
-"Er--what have you brought to eat?" asked the preadamite in a quavering
-voice.
-
-"Nothing to be sure.  What is a fonda for?"
-
-"Ah, then how can la señora mía get you supper? Over the way is the
-butcher, beyond, the green-grocer, further still the panadero--"
-
-I returned some time later with meat, bread, potatoes, garbanzos, and a
-variety of vegetables, supplied with which the señora duly prepared me a
-supper--by sitting tight in her chair and issuing a volley of commands
-to the girl and the old man.  For this service she demanded two "fat
-dogs," and collected at the same time an equal amount for my lodging.
-
-When I had eaten, the mistress of the house mumbled a word to the
-dotard.  He lighted with trembling hand a sort of miner's lamp and led
-the way downward into the subterranean stable and for what seemed little
-short of a half-mile through great stone vaults musty with time, close
-by the cruppers of an army of mules and burros.  Opening at last a door
-some three feet square and as many above the floor, he motioned to me to
-climb through it into a bin filled with chaff.  This was to all
-appearances clean, yet I hesitated.  For in these endless vaults, to
-which the outer air seemed not to have penetrated for a century, it was
-cold as a November evening. I glanced at the old man in protest.  He
-blinked back at me, shook his ever-quaking head a bit more forcibly, and
-turning, shuffled away through the resounding cavern, the torch casting
-at first weird, dancing shadows behind his wavering legs, then gradually
-dying out entirely.  I stood in blackest darkness, undecided.  Before,
-however, the last faint sound of his going had wholly passed away, the
-scrape of the veteran's faltering feet grew louder again and in another
-moment he reappeared, clutching under one thin arm a heavy blanket.
-When I had taken it, he put a finger to his lips, cast his sunken eyes
-about him, whispered "sh!" with a labored wink, and tottered once more
-away.  I climbed into the bin and slept soundly until the cursing of
-arrieros harnessing their mules aroused me shortly before dawn.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER IX
-
-                        THE TRAIL OF THE PRIEST
-
-
-The people of Tembleque had been just certain enough that none but an
-arriero could follow the intricate route thither, and that no man could
-cover the distance on foot in one day, to cause me to awaken determined
-to leave the Madrid highway and strike cross-country to Toledo.  The
-first stage of the journey was the road to the village of Mora, which I
-was long in finding because at its entrance to--which chanced also to be
-its exit from--Tembleque it split up like an unraveled shoe-string.  I
-got beyond the loose ends at last, however, and set a sharp pace--even
-though the hole in my shoe had enlarged to the size of a peseta--across
-a scarred and weather-beaten landscape that seemed constantly reminding
-how aged is the world.
-
-Twenty-four kilometers brought me to Mora, a sturdy town of countrymen,
-in time for an early and stinted dinner and inquiries which led me off
-in a new direction up a steadily mounting region to Mascargne.  There,
-at a still different point of the compass, a ruined castle on a hilltop
-ten kilometers away was pointed out to me as the landmark of El
-Monacail; to which village a rugged and sterile road clambered over a
-country hunch-backed with hills.  It was siesta-time when I arrived, the
-sun scorching hot, a burning wind sweeping among the patched and
-misshapen hovels that made up the place.  There were no inhabitants
-abroad, which argued their good sense; but in the shadow of the only
-public building a trio of soldiers were playing at cards.  They leered
-at me for some time when I made inquiry, then burst out in derisive
-laughter.
-
-"Claro, hombre!" answered one of them sarcastically. "You can walk to
-Toledo la Santa if you know enough to follow a cow-path."
-
-I stumbled into it just beyond, a cow-path indeed, though too little
-used to be clearly marked, and meandering in and out with it for twenty
-kilometers through rocky _barrancas_ and across sandy patches, gained as
-the day was nearing its close the wind-bitten village of Nambroca.  A
-few miles more through a still greater chaos of rocks and I came out
-unexpectedly on the crest of a jagged promontory that brought me to a
-sudden halt before one of the most fascinating panoramas in all Spain.
-
-A still higher rise cutting off the foreground, there began a few miles
-beyond, the vast, wrinkled, verdureless plateau of Castile, rolling away
-and upward like an enormous tilted profile-map of the world, sea-blue
-with distance and heat rays, all details blended together into an
-indistinctness that left only an undivided impression like a Whistlerian
-painting. I pushed forward and at the top of the next ridge gasped aloud
-with new wonder.  From this summit the world fell pell-mell away at my
-feet into a bottomless gorge; and beyond, two or three miles away, the
-culminating point in a tumultuous landscape of ravines, gulleys and
-precipitous chasms, sat an Oriental city, close-packed and isolated in
-its rocky solitude, the sun's last rays casting over its domes and
-minaret-like spires a flood of color that seemed suddenly and bodily to
-transport the beholder into the very heart of Asia.  My goal was won;
-before me lay the ancient capital of the Goths, history-rich Toledo.
-
-I sat down on the crest of the precipice overhanging the Tajo, almost
-beneath the enormous iron cross set in a rock to mark Toledo as the
-religious center of Spain, and remained watching the city across the
-gulf, full certain that whatever offered within its walls could in no
-degree equal the view from this facing hilltop.  Richly indeed did this
-one sight of her reward the long day's tramp across the choking hills,
-even had there not been a pleasure in the walk itself; and upon me fell
-a great pity for those that come to her by railroad in the glare of day
-and the swelter of humanity.
-
-As I sat, and the scene was melting away into the descending night, a
-voice sounded behind me and a ragged, slouching son of fortune proffered
-the accustomed greeting and, rolling a cigarette, sat down at my side.
-He was a "child of Toledo," and of his native city we fell to talking.
-At length he raised his flabby fist and, shaking it at the twinkling
-lights across the Tajo, cried out:
-
-"O Toledo, my city!  Gaunt, sunken-bellied Toledo, bound to your rock
-and devoured by the vulture horde of bloated churchmen while your
-children are starving!
-
-"Señor," he continued, suddenly returning to a conversational tone, "let
-me show you but one of a thousand iniquities of these frailuchos."
-
-He rose and led the way a little further along the path I had been
-following, halting at the edge of a yawning hole in the rocks, like a
-bottomless well, the existence of which I was thankful to have learned
-before I continued my way.
-
-"Señor," he said, "no man can tell how many have died here, for it lies,
-as you see, in the very center of the trail over these hills.  For a
-hundred years, as my grandfather has known, it has stood so.  But do you
-think yon cursed priests would spend a perrito of their blood-sweated
-booty to cover it?"
-
-It was black night when I picked my way down into the valley of the Tajo
-and, crossing the Alkántara bridge, climbed painfully upstairs into
-Toledo. Even within, the Oriental impression was not lost, though the
-Castilian tongue sounded on every side. With each step forward came some
-new sign to recall that for half the past eight hundred years Toledo was
-an Arab-ruled and Arabic-speaking city.  Thus it is still her Eastern
-fashion to conceal her wealth by building her houses inwardly, leaving
-for public thoroughfare the narrow, haphazard passageways between them,
-and giving to the arriving stranger the sensation of wandering through a
-haughty crowd of which each coldly turns his back.
-
-Her medley of streets was such as one might find in removing the top of
-an ant-hill, an ant-hill in which modern improvements have made little
-progress; her pavements of round, century-polished cobble-stones,
-glinting in the weak light of an occasional street-lamp, were painful
-indeed to blistered feet. Ugly and barn-like outwardly, like the
-Alhambra, hen houses frequently resemble that ancient palace, too, in
-that they are rich with decoration and comfort within.  It was an hour
-or more before I was directed to a casa de huéspedes in the calle de la
-Lechuga, or Lettuce street, a gloomy crack between two rows of
-buildings.  The house itself was such as only a man of courage would
-have entered by night in any other city.  I ventured in, however, and
-found the family out-of-doors--lolling in the flower and palm-grown
-patio beneath the star-riddled sky, the canvas that formed the roof by
-day being drawn back.  Even the well was in the patio, on which opened,
-like the others, the room to which I was assigned, presenting toward the
-street a blank, windowless wall.
-
-It was late the next forenoon before I had slept the forty hot and rocky
-miles out of my legs and sallied forth to visit a shoemaker.  As he
-lived only two streets away, it was my good fortune to find him in less
-than an hour, and as Toledo is the last city in the world in which a man
-would care to run about in his socks, I sat on a stool beside his
-workbench for something over three hours.  His home and shop consisted
-of one cavernous room; his family, of a wife who sewed so incessantly
-that one might easily have fancied her run by machinery, and of a
-daughter of six who devised more amusement with a few scraps of leather
-than many another might with all the toys of Nürnberg.  The shoemaker
-was of that old-fashioned tribe of careful workmen, taking pride in
-their labor, whom it is always a joy to meet--though not always to sit
-waiting for.  He, too, hinted at the misery of life in Toledo, but
-unlike the specter of the night before, did not lay the blame for the
-sunken condition of his city on the "frailuchos," charging it rather to
-the well-known perverseness of fate, either because he was of an
-orthodox turn of mind or because his wife sat close at hand.  When he
-had finished, having sewed soles and nailed heels on my shoes that were
-to endure until Spain was left behind, he collected a sum barely equal
-to forty cents.
-
-In striking contrast to him--indeed, the two well illustrated the two
-types of workmen the world harbors--was the barber who performed the
-next service.  He was a mountain of sloth who rose with almost a growl
-at being disturbed and, his mind elsewhere, listlessly proceeded to the
-task before him. Though he was over forty and knew no other trade, he
-had not learned even this one, but haggled and clawed as that breed of
-man will who drifts through life without training himself to do
-anything.  The reflective wanderer comes more and more to respect only
-the man, be he merely a street-sweeper, who does his life's work
-honestly; the "four-flusher" is ever a source of nausea and a lowerer of
-the tone of life, be he the president of a nation.
-
-While I suffered, a priest dropped in to have his tonsure renovated and
-gloriously outdid in the scrofulousness of his anecdotes not only this
-clumsy wielder of the helmet of Mambrino, but exposed poor timorous
-Boccaccio for a prude and a Quaker.
-
-Packed away down in a hollow of the congested city is that famous
-cathedral surnamed "la Rica."  "The Rich"--it would be nearer justice to
-dub her the Midian, the Ostentatious, for she is so overburdened and
-top-heavy with wealth that one experiences at sight of her a feeling
-almost of disgust, as for a woman garish with jewelry.  We of the United
-States must see, to conceive what shiploads of riches are heaped up
-within the churches of Spain by the superstitions of her people and the
-rapacity of her priests, who, discovering the impossibility of laying up
-their booty hereafter, agree with many groans to stack it here.
-
-"The Spanish church," observes Gautier, "is scarcely any longer
-frequented except by tourists, mendicants, and horrible old women."  If
-one choose the right hour of the afternoon even these vexations are
-chiefly absent, entirely, perhaps, but for a poor old crone or two
-kneeling before some mammoth doll tricked out to represent the Virgin
-and bowing down now and then in true Mohammedan fashion to kiss the
-stone flagging.  The Iberian traveler must visit the cathedrals of the
-peninsula, not merely because they offer the only cool retreat on a
-summer day, but because they are the museums of Spain's art and history.
-But even the splendor of the setting sun through her marvelous
-stained-glass windows cannot overcome the oppressiveness of "la Rica."
-
-As he stands before the wondrous paintings that enrich the great
-religious edifices of Spain, the matter-of-fact American of to-day is
-not unlikely to be assailed by other thoughts than the pure esthetic.
-There comes, perhaps, the reflection of how false is that oft-repeated
-assertion that the world's truly great artists exercised their genius
-solely for pure art's sake.  Would they then have prostituted their
-years on earth to tickling the vanity of their patrons, in depicting the
-wife of some rich candle-maker walking arm in arm with the Nazarene on
-the Mount of Olives, or the absurdity of picturing Saint Fulano, who was
-fed to Roman lions in A.D. 300, strolling through a Sevillian garden
-with the infant Jesus in his arms and a heavenly smirk on his
-countenance? How much greater treasures might we have to-day had they
-thrown off the double yoke of contemporaneous superstitions and
-servility to wealth and painted, for example, the real Mary as in their
-creative souls they saw her, the simple Jewish housewife amid her plain
-Syrian surroundings.  Instead of which they have set on canvas and ask
-us to accept as their real conception voluptuous-faced "Virgins" who
-were certainly painted from models of a very different type, and into
-whose likeness in spite of the painter's skill has crept a hint that the
-poser's thoughts during the sitting were much less on her assumed
-motherhood of a deity than on the coming evening's amours.
-
-Horror, too, stands boldly forth in Spanish painting. The Spaniard is,
-incongruously enough, as realist of the first water.  He will see things
-materially, graphically; the bullfight is his great delight, not the
-pretended reality of the theater. Centuries of fighting the infidel,
-centuries of courting self-sacrifice in slaying heretics, the reaction
-against the sensuous gentleness of the Moor, have all combined to make
-his Christianity fervid, savage, sanguinary.  Yielding to which
-characteristic of his fellow-countrymen, or tainted with it himself,
-many a Spanish artist seems to have gloried in depicting in all gruesome
-detail martyrs undergoing torture, limbs and breasts lopped off and
-lying bleeding close at hand, unshaven torturers wielding their dripping
-knives with fiendish merriment.  These horrors, too, are set up in
-public places of worship, where little children come daily, and even men
-on occasion.  It is strange, indeed, if childhood's proneness to
-imitation does not make the playground frequently the scene of similar
-martyrdoms.  How much better to treat the tots to a daily visit to the
-morgue, where what they see would at least be true to nature--and far
-less repulsive.
-
-There are other "sights" in Toledo than the cathedral for him who is
-successful in running them down in her jungle of streets.  Each such
-chase is certain sooner or later to bring him out into the Zocodover,
-that disheveled central plaza in which the sunbeams fall like a shower
-of arrows.  The inferno into which he seems plunged unwarned chokes at
-once the rambler's grumble at the intricacies of the city and brings him
-instead to mumble praises of the Arabs, who had the good sense so to
-build that the sun with his best endeavors rarely gets a peep into the
-depth of the pavement; and the time is short indeed before he dives back
-into the relief of one of the radiating calles.
-
-As often as I crossed the "Zoco" my eyes were drawn to a ragged fellow
-of my own age, with a six-inch stump for one leg, lolling prone on the
-dirt-carpeted earth in a corner of the square, mumbling from time to
-time over his cigarette:
-
-"Una limosnita, señores; qué Dios se lo pagará."
-
-There was in his face evidence that he had been born with fully average
-gifts, perhaps special talents; and a sensation of sadness mingled with
-anger came upon me with the reflection that through all the years I had
-been living and learning and journeying to and fro upon the earth, this
-hapless fellow-mortal had been squatting in the dust of Toledo's
-Zocodover, droning the national lamentation:
-
-"A little alms, señores, and may God repay you."
-
-Just another was he of her thousands of sons that Spain has wantonly let
-go to waste, until even at this early age he had sunk to a lump of
-living human carrion that all the powers of earth or from Elsewhere
-could not remake into the semblance of a man.
-
-Try though one may, one cannot escape the conviction that the fat of
-Toledo goes to the priesthood, both physically and figuratively.  High
-or low, the churchmen that overrun the place have all a sleek, contented
-air and on their cynical, sordid faces an all too plain proof of
-addiction to the flesh pots; while the layman has always a hungry look,
-not quite always of animal hunger for food, but at least for those
-things that stand next above.  Nowhere can one escape the cloth.  Every
-half-hour one is sure to run across at least a bishop tottering under a
-fortune's-worth of robes and attended by a bodyguard of acolytes,
-pausing now and again to shed his putative blessing on some devout
-passer-by.  Of lesser dignitaries, of cowled monks and religious
-mendicants there is no lack, while with the common or garden variety of
-priest, a cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth, his shovel hat
-set at a rakish angle, his black gown swinging with the jauntiness of a
-stage Mephistopheles, ogling the girls in street or promenade, the city
-swarms.  Distressingly close is the resemblance of these latter to those
-creatures one may find loitering about the stage-door toward the
-termination of a musical comedy.
-
-I sat one afternoon on a bench of that broken promenade that partly
-surrounds Toledo high above the Tajo, watching the sun set across the
-western vega, when my thoughts were suddenly snatched back through fully
-a thousand years of time by the six-o'clock whistle of the Fabrica de
-Armas below. When my astonishment had died away, there came over me the
-recollection that not once before in all Spain had I heard that sound, a
-factory whistle. Agreeable as that absence of sibilant discord is to the
-wanderer's soul, I could not but wonder whether just there is not the
-outward mark of one of the chief reasons why the Spain of to-day
-straggles where she does in the procession of nations.
-
-I descended one afternoon from Lettuce street to the sand-clouded
-station on the plain and spent the ensuing night in Aranjuez, a modern
-checker-board city planted with exotic elms and royal palaces.  It was
-again afternoon before I turned out into the broad highway that,
-crossing the Tajo, struck off with business-like directness across a
-vega fertile with wheat.  Before long it swung sharply to the right and,
-laboring up the scarified face of a cliff, gained the great central
-tableland of Castilla Nueva, then stalked away across a weird and solemn
-landscape as drear and desolate as the hills of Judea.
-
-The crabbed village that I fell upon at dusk furnished me bread and
-wine, but no lodging.  I plodded on, trusting soon to find a more
-hospitable hamlet. But the desolation increased with the night; neither
-man nor habitation appeared.  Toward eleven I gave up the search and,
-stepping off the edge of the highway, found a bit of space unencumbered
-with rocks and lay down until the dawn.
-
-The sun rose murky.  In twenty kilometers the deserted carretera passed
-only two squalid wineshops.  Then rounding in mid-morning a slight
-eminence, it presented suddenly to my eyes a smoky, indistinct, yet vast
-city stretching on a higher plane half across the desolate horizon.  It
-was Madrid. I tramped hours longer, so uncertainly did the highway
-wander to and fro seeking an entrance, but came at last into a miserable
-outskirt village and tossed away the stick that had borne my knapsack
-since the day I had fashioned that convenience in the southern foothills
-of Andalusia. Two besmirched street Arabs, pouncing upon it almost as it
-fell--so extraordinary a curiosity was it in this unwooded region--waged
-pitched battle until each carried away a half triumphant.  I pushed on
-across the massive Puente de Toledo high above the trickle of water that
-goes by the name of the river Manzanares and, mounting through a city as
-different from Toledo as Cairo from Damascus, halted at last in the
-mildly animated Puerta del Sol, the center of Spain and, to the
-Spaniard, of the universe.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER X
-
-                         SHADOWS OF THE PHILIPS
-
-
-A day or two later I was installed for a fortnight in a casa de
-huéspedes in the calle San Bernardo.  In such places as one plans to
-remain for any length of time there are few cheaper arrangements for
-ample fare in all Europe than these Spanish "houses of guests."  My
-room, which was temporarily on the second-floor front, but solemnly
-pledged to be soon changed to the third-floor back, was all that an
-unpampered wanderer could have required.  Breakfast was light; a cup of
-chocolate and a roll--no self-respecting traveler ventures to sample
-Spanish coffee more than once.  But one soon grows accustomed and indeed
-to prefer the European abstemiousness at the first meal.  In
-compensation the _almuerzo_ and _comida_, at twelve and seven, were more
-than abundant.  A thick soup, not unseldom redolent of garlic, was
-followed by a salad, and that by a _puchero_, which is to say an entire
-meal on one platter,--in the center a square of boiled beef flanked like
-St. Peter's amid the hills of Rome by seven varieties of vegetables, the
-_garbanzos_--bright yellow chickpeas of the size of marbles--with the
-usual disproportion granted that robust comestible in Spain,
-overtowering not only every other eminence but carpeting the intervening
-valleys.  That despatched, or seriously disfigured, there came a second
-offering from the animal world,--a _cocido_ or an _olla podrida_, after
-which the repast descended gradually by fruit, cheese, and cigarettes to
-its termination.  Through it all a common wine flowed generously.
-
-Even on Friday this sturdy good cheer knew no abatement.  Centuries ago,
-in the raging days of the Moor, the faithful of Spain were granted for
-their Catholic zeal and bodily behoof this dispensation, that they might
-nourish their lean frames on whatever it should please Santiago, their
-patron, to bring within bowshot of their home-made crosspieces. The Moor
-has long since removed his dusky shadow from the land, but the
-dispensation remains. Indeed, there is left scarcely a custom the
-inobservance of which betrays the non-Catholic; or if one there be at
-all general it is this: when he yawns--which he is not unwont to do even
-at table--the devout Spaniard makes over his mouth the sign of the
-cross, to keep the devil from gaining a foothold therein--an exorcism
-that is not always successful.
-
-There is yet another custom, quite the opposite of religious in result
-at least, which the guest at a casa de huéspedes must school himself to
-endure.  It grows out of the Spaniard's infernal politeness. Figure to
-yourself that you have just returned from a morning of tramping through
-sweltering Madrid on the ephemeral breakfast already noted, and sit down
-at table just as a steaming puchero is served. With a melodious and
-self-sacrificing "Serve yourself, señor," the addle-pated Spaniard
-across the way pushes the dish to his neighbor; to which the neighbor
-responds by pushing it back again with a "No!  Serve _yourself_, señor,"
-followed in quick succession by "No!  No!  Serve yourself, señor;" "No!
-No!  No! señor!  Serve yourself!" "No!  No!  No! No! serve--" and so on
-to the end of time, or until a wrathy Anglo-Saxon, rising in his place,
-picks up the source of dispute and establishes order.
-
-Our household in the calle San Bernardo consisted of a lawyer, a "man of
-affairs"--using the latter word in its widest signification--of two
-young Germans, "Don Hermann" and "Don Ricardo," for some time employed
-in the city, and of the family itself.  Of this the husband, a
-slouching, toothless fellow of fifty, and the grandmother were mere
-supernumeraries.  The speaking parts were taken by the wife and
-daughter, the former an enormous, unpolished woman with a well-developed
-mustache and the over-developed voice of a stevedore. Indeed, a
-stentorian, grating voice and a habit of speaking always at the tiptop
-of it is one of the chief afflictions of the Spanish women of the
-masses--and of their hearers.  Is it by chance due to the custom of
-studying and reciting always aloud and in chorus during their few years
-of schooling?  Quién sabe?  There was presented during my stay in Madrid
-the play, or more properly playlet--zarzuela--"Levantar Mueros--Raising
-the Dead"; but I dared not go lest it turn out to be a dramatized sewing
-circle.
-
-But it remains to introduce the star member of the cast, the center of
-that San Bernardo universe around which revolved mother,
-supernumeraries, and guests like planets in their orbits--the daughter.
-I fully expect to wander many a weary mile before I again behold so
-beautiful a maid--or one that I should take more pleasure in being a
-long way distant from. She was sixteen--which in Spain is past
-childhood--a glorious, faultless blonde in a land where blondes are at
-high premium, her lips forming what the Spaniard calls a "nido de
-besos"--a nest of osculatory delights--and--  But why drive the
-impossible task further?  Such radiant perfections in human form must be
-seen at least to be appreciated. It is sufficient, perhaps, to mention
-that her likeness was on sale in every novelty shop in Madrid and found
-more purchasers than that of Machaquito, King of the Toreros.  In short,
-a supreme beauty--had she been captured early and suitably polished
-instead of remaining at home with mother until she had acquired mother's
-voice, and mother's roughshod manners, and a slothful habit of life that
-was destined, alas, in all probability to end by reproducing her
-mother's bulk and mustache.
-
-There are two things worth seeing in howling, meeowling, brawling,
-blistering Madrid--her outdoor life and the Prado museum.  It was the
-latter that I viewed by day, for when relentless August has settled down
-the capital is not merely hot, it is plutonic, cowering under a dead,
-sultry heat without the relief of a breath of air, a heat that weighs
-down like a leaden blanket and makes Seville seem by comparison a
-northern seaport.  A saying as old as its foolish founder's grave
-credits the city with three month's invierno and nine months' infierno,
-a characterization that loses much in symmetry, though gaining, perhaps,
-in force by translation.  It was my fortune to have happened into the
-place when the lowest circle of the latter region was having its inning.
-
-Wherefore I went often to the Prado; and came as often away more
-physically fatigued than after a four-hour watch in a stokehole, and
-with my head in a bewildered whirl that even a long stroll in the Buen
-Retiro only partly reduced.  It is like the irrationality of man to
-bring together these thousands of masterpieces, so close together that
-not one of them can produce a tenth of its proper effect. Of the
-pictures in the Prado the seeing alone would require two years of
-continuous work, the attempt to describe, a lifetime; pictures running
-through all the gamut of art from the fading of the pre-Raphaelites down
-to Goya, that plain-spoken Goya who seems to have stood afar off and
-thrown paint by the bucketful at his canvas--with marvelous results.  A
-pandemonium of paintings, not one of which but off by itself would bring
-daily inspiration to all beholders.  It is the tendency of all things to
-crowd together--wealth, art, learning, work, leisure, poverty; man's
-duty to combat this tendency by working for a sane and equitable
-distribution.  The Prado collection would be a treasure, indeed, had
-those who exerted themselves to bring these paintings together given
-half that exertion to spreading them out.  Then it might be that in a
-land as rich with art as Spain one would not find daubs and
-beer-calendars hung in the place of honor in the homes and fondas of
-"the masses."  When the good day comes that the accumulation of the
-Prado is dispersed I shall bespeak as my share the "Borrachos" or
-"Vulcan's Forge" of sturdy Velazquez.
-
-[Illustration: La Puerta del Sol, Madrid: the Spaniard']
-
-center of the universe]
-
-Those who are curious may also visit, at seasons and with permissions,
-the unpleasing royal palace, about the outer walls of which sleep scores
-of fly-proof vagrants in the shade of half leafless trees, and sundry
-other government buildings, all of which--except the vagrants--are duly
-and fully described in the guide-books.  There is, too, the daily _juego
-de Pelota_, imported from the Basque provinces, a sort of enlarged
-handball played in a slate-walled chamber in which the screaming of
-gamblers for bids and their insults to the players know no cessation.
-Wandering aimlessly through her streets, as the sojourner in Madrid must
-who cannot daily sleep the day through, I found myself often pausing to
-admire the splendid displays in the windows of her tailors.  Spain has
-no wool schedule, and as I gazed a deep regret came over me that I could
-not always be a dweller in Madrid when my garb grows threadbare or a
-tailor bill falls due.  But there was sure remedy for such melancholy.
-When it grew acute I had but to turn and note the fitting of these
-splendid fabrics on the passer-by, and the sadness changed to a wonder
-that the madrileño tailor has the audacity to charge at all for his
-services.
-
-[Illustration: An Alameda by day--chairs stacked until busy night-time]
-
-So bare and uninviting are her environs--and she has no suburbs--that
-Madrid never retires outwardly as other cities for her picnics and
-holidays, but crowds more closely together in the Buen Retiro. The
-congestion is greatest about the Estanque Grande.  The largest body of
-water the normal madrileño ever sees is this artificial pond of about
-the area--though not the depth--of a college swimming-pool.  On it are
-marooned a few venerable rowboats, for a ride in which most of the
-residents of Madrid have been politely quarreling every fair day since
-they reached a quarrelsome age.  Small wonder dwellers in the capital
-cry out in horror at the idea of drinking water.  One might as sanely
-talk of burning wood for fuel.
-
-Obviously no untraveled native of "las Cortes" has more than a vague
-conception of the sea. Indeed, the ignorance on this point is nothing
-short of pathetic, if one may judge from the popular sea novel that fell
-into my hands during my stay.  The writer evidently dwelt in the usual
-hotbox that constitutes a Madrid lodging and had not the remotest,
-wildest notion what thing a sea may be, nor the ability to tell a
-mainsail from a missionary's mule. But he was a clever man--to have
-concocted such a yarn and escaped persecution.
-
-Madrid, however, like all urban Spain, comes thoroughly to life only
-with the fall of night. Occasionally a special celebration carries her
-populace to some strange corner of the city, but the fixed rendezvous is
-the Paseo de Recoletos, a broader Alameda where reigns by day an
-un-Spanish opulence of shade enjoyed only by the chairs stacked
-house-high beneath the trees.  There is nothing hurried about the
-congregating.  Dinner leisurely finished, the madrileño of high or low
-degree begins to drift slowly thither.  By nine the public benches are
-taken; by ten one can and must move only with the throng at the accepted
-pace, or pay a copper to sit in haughty state in one of the now
-unstacked chairs. Toward ten-thirty a military band straggles in from
-the four points of the compass, finishes its cigarette, languidly
-unlimbers its instruments, and near eleven falls to work--or play.
-About the same time there come wandering through the trees, as if drawn
-here by merest chance, five threadbare blind men, each with a battered
-violin or horn tucked tenderly under one arm.  During the opening number
-they listen attentively, in silence, after the manner of musicians. Then
-as the official players pause to roll new cigarettes the sightless
-ragamuffins take their stand near at hand and strike up a music that
-more than one city of the western world could do worse than subsidize.
-Thereafter melody is incessant; and with it the murmur of countless
-voices, the scrape of leisurely feet on the gravel, the cries of the
-hawkers of all that may by any chance be sought, and louder and more
-insistent than all else the baying of newsboys--aged forty to sixty and
-of both sexes--"_El País!_" "_El Heraldo!_" "_La
-Cor-r-respondencia-a-a-a!_"
-
-Midnight!  Why, midnight is only late in the afternoon in Madrid.  The
-concert does not end until three and half the babies of the city are
-playing in the sand along the Paseo de Recoletos when the musicians
-leave.  Besides, what else is to be done?  Even did one feel the
-slightest desire to turn in there is not the remotest possibility of
-finding one's room less than a sweatbox.  The populace shows little
-inclination to disperse, and though many saunter unwillingly homeward
-for form's sake, it is not to sleep, for one may still hear chatting and
-the muffled twang of guitars behind the blinds of the open windows.  As
-for myself, I drifted commonly after the concert into the "Circo
-Americano" or a zarzuela, though such entertainments demonstrated
-nothing except how easily the madrileño is amused.  Yet even these close
-early--for Madrid; and rambling gradually into my adopted section, it
-was usually my fortune to run across a "friend of the house"--of whom
-more anon--to retire with him to the nearest _Juego de Billar_, or
-billiard-hall, there to play the night gray-headed.
-
-The doors of Madrid close at midnight, and neither the madrileño nor his
-guests have yet reached that stage of civilization where they can be
-entrusted with their own latch-key.  But it is easy for all that to gain
-admittance.  One has only to halt before one's door, clap one's hands
-soundly three or six or nine or fifteen times, bawl in one's most
-musical and top-most voice, "Ser-r-r-r-reno!" not forgetting to roll the
-r like the whir of a broken emery-wheel, and then sit calmly down on the
-curb and wait.  Within a half-hour, or an hour at most, the watchman is
-almost sure to appear, rattling with gigantic keys, carrying staff and
-lantern, and greeting the exile with all the compliments of the Spanish
-season, unlocks, furnishes him a lighted wax taper, wishes him a "good
-night" and a long day's sleep, and gracefully pockets his two-cent fee.
-
-Theoretically the sereno is supposed to keep order--or at least orderly.
-But nothing is more noted for its absence in Madrid by night than order.
-The sereno of the calle San Bernardo showed great liking for the
-immediate neighborhood of our casa de huéspedes--after I had been
-admitted.  Rare the night--that is, morning--that he did not sit down
-beneath my window--for my promotion to the third-floor back was
-postponed until I left the city--with a pair of hackmen or day-hawks and
-fall to rehearsing in a foghorn-voice the story of his noble past. Twice
-or thrice I let drop a hint in the form of what water was in my pitcher.
-But the serenos of Madrid are imperturbable, and water is precious.  On
-each such occasion the romancer moved over some two feet and serenely
-continued his tale until the rising sun sent him strolling homeward.
-
-"Don Ricardo," of our German boarders, aspired to change from his stool
-in a banking-house to the bullring.  He had taken a course in Madrid's
-Escuela Taurina and was already testing his prowess each Sunday as a
-banderillero in the little plaza of Tetuan, a few miles outside the
-city.  In consequence--for "Ricardo" was a companionable youth for all
-his ragged Spanish--our casa de huéspedes became a rendezvous of lesser
-lights in the taurine world.  Two or three toreros were sure to drop in
-each evening before we had sipped the last of our wine, to spend an hour
-or two in informal _tertulia_. I had not been a week in the city before
-I numbered among my acquaintances Curdito, Capita de Carmona, Pepete,
-and Moreno de Alcala, all men whose names have decorated many a ringside
-poster.
-
-There appeared one evening among the "friends of the house" a young man
-of twenty, of singularly attractive appearance and personality.
-Clear-eyed, of lithe yet muscular frame, and a spring-like quickness in
-every movement, he was noticeable above all for his modest deportment,
-having barely a touch of that arrogant self-esteem that is so frequently
-the dominating characteristic of the Spaniard.  His speech was the soft,
-musical Andalusian; his conversation quickly demonstrated him a man of a
-high rate of intelligence.
-
-Such was Faustino Posadas, bullfighter, already a favorite among the
-aficionados of Spain, though it is by no means often that a youth of
-twenty finds himself vested with the red muleta.  Son of the
-spare-limbed old herder who has been keeper for many years of the
-Tabladas, or bull pastures, of Seville, he had been familiar with the
-animals and their ways from early childhood.  At sixteen he was already
-a banderillero.  A famous espada carried him in his caudrilla to Peru
-and an accident to a fellow torero gave him the opportunity to despatch
-his first two bulls in the plaza of Lima.  He returned to Spain a
-full-fledged "novillero" and was rapidly advancing to the rank of
-graduate espada, with the right to appear before bulls of any age.
-
-Once introduced, Posadas appeared often in the calle San Bernardo; much
-too often in fact to leave any suspicion that either his friendship for
-"Don Ricardo" or the charms of our conversation was the chief cause of
-his coming.  A very few days passed before it had become a fixed and
-accepted custom for him to set out toward nine for the Paseo with the
-radiant daughter of the house--though mother waddled between, of course,
-after the dictates of Spanish etiquette.  Within a week he was received
-by the family on the footing of a declared suitor; and of his favor with
-the señorita there was no room for doubt.
-
-There was always a long hour between the termination of supper and the
-time when Madrid began its nightly promenade, during which it was
-natural that our conversation should touch chiefly upon affairs of the
-ring.
-
-"Don Henrico," asked Capita one evening--for I was known to the company
-as "Henrico Franco"--"is it true that there are no bullfights in your
-country?"
-
-"Vaya que gente!" burst out Moreno, when I had at length succeeded in
-making clear to them our national objections to the sport.  "What
-rubbish!  What does it matter if a few old hacks that would soon fall
-dead of themselves are killed to make sport for the aficionados?  As for
-the bull--  Carajo, hombre!  You yourself, if you were in such a rage as
-the toro, would no more feel the thrust of a sword than the pricking of
-a gadfly."
-
-Posadas, on the other hand, readily grasped the American point of view.
-He even admitted that he found the goring of the horses unpleasant and
-that he would gladly see that feature of the córrida eliminated if there
-were any other way of tiring the bull before the last act.  But for the
-bull himself he professed no sympathy whatever.
-
-"What would you have us do?" he cried in conclusion.  "Spain offers
-nothing else for a son of the people without political pull than to
-become torero.  Without that we must work as peasants on black bread and
-a peseta a day."
-
-"As in any other trade," I inquired, "I suppose you enter the ring
-without any thought of danger, any feeling of fear?"
-
-"No, I don't remember ever being afraid," laughed the Sevillian, "though
-when Miúra furnishes the stock I like to hear mass before the córrida."
-
-"What are the secrets of success?"
-
-"I know only one," answered Posadas, "and that is no secret.  Every move
-the bull makes shows first in the whites of his eyes.  Never for an
-instant do I take my eyes off his.  So it has been my luck not to be
-once wounded," he concluded, making the sign of the cross.
-
-"Cogidas!" cried Capita, passing a hand over a dull brown welt on his
-neck.  "Caramba!  I have five of them, and every one by a cursed miúra.
-No, I never felt pain, only a cold chill that runs down to your very
-toes.  But afterward--in the hospital!  Carajo!"
-
-One would suppose that men engaged in so perilous a calling would take
-extreme bodily care of themselves.  Not a torero among them, however,
-knew the meaning of "training" as the word is used by our athletes.
-They drank, smoked--even during the córrida--ate what and when they
-pleased, and more commonly spent the night strolling in the Paseo with
-an "amiga" or carousing in a wineshop than sleeping.  Whether it is a
-leaving of the Moor or native to this blear, rocky land, there is much
-of the fatalist in the Spaniard, especially the Andalusian.  He is by
-nature a gambler; be he torero, beggar, or senator, he is always ready
-and willing to "take a chance."
-
-"If a man is marked to be killed in the ring he will be killed there,"
-asserted Pepete.  "He cannot change his fate by robbing himself of the
-pleasures of life."
-
-Posadas was engaged to appear in the plaza of Madrid on the first Sunday
-of our acquaintance. When I descended to the street at three the city
-was already drifting ringward, a picador in full trim now and then
-cantering by on his Rozinante--a sight fully as exciting to the populace
-as the circus parade of our own land.  I had reached the edge of the
-Puerta del Sol when I heard a "Hola, amigo!" behind me and turning,
-beheld none other than Jesús the Sevillian bearing down upon me with
-outstretched hand.  He had found work at his trade in the city--though
-not yet a barber apparently.
-
-"And Gásparo?" I asked.
-
-"Perdido, señor!  Lost again!" he sighed. "Perhaps he has found a new
-amiga.  But I much more fear he has fallen into the fingers of the
-police.  Mira V., señor.  In all the journey we have not been able once
-to hide ourselves on a freight train.  At last, señor, in Castillejo,
-Gásparo goes mad and swears he will ride once for nothing.  With twenty
-people looking on he climbs a wagon.  A man shouts 'thief!' and around
-the station comes running a guardia civil.  I have not been able to find
-Gásparo since.  Señor, I have come to think it is not right to ride on
-the railroad without a ticket.  Gásparo, perhaps, is in prison.  But we
-will meet again when he comes out," he concluded cheerfully, as I turned
-away.
-
-At the plaza fully twelve thousand were gathered.  The córrida was
-distinguished particularly for its clumsiness, though the fighters,
-while young, were not without reputation.  Falls and bruises were
-innumerable and the entire performance a chapter of accidents that kept
-the aficionados in an uproar and gave no small amount of work to the
-attendant surgeons.  Of the three matadores, Serenito, a hulking fellow
-whose place seemed last of all in the bullring, was gored across the
-loins by his first bull and forced to abandon his task and fee to the
-sobresaliente.  Then Platerito--"Silver-plated"--a mere whisp of a man,
-having dedicated to the populace as is the custom in Madrid the death of
-the fifth bull, gasconaded up to the animal, fell immediately foul of a
-horn, whirled about like a rag caught on a fly-wheel, and landed on his
-shoulders fully sixty feet away.  To the astonishment even of the
-aficionados he sprang to his feet as jaunty as ever and duly despatched
-the animal, though not over handily.
-
-The misfortunes of his fellows served to bring out by contrast the skill
-of Posadas.  Not only did he pass the day unscathed, but killed both his
-bulls at the first thrust so instantly that the thud of their fall might
-be heard outside the plaza, how rare a feat only he knows who has
-watched the hacking and butchering of many a "novillero."  Indeed, so
-pleasing was his work that he was at once engaged, contrary to all
-precedent, to appear again on the ensuing Sunday.
-
-By that time I had learned enough of the "fine points of the game" to
-recognize that the Sevillian was approaching already true matador
-"form," and as I took leave of him next day it was with the conviction
-that success in his chosen career was as sure as the certainty of soon
-winning his most cherished reward.
-
-"Vaya, Don Henrico," he laughed as we shook hands.  "We shall see each
-other again.  Some day when I go to Mexico or the Americas of the south
-I shall come by New York and you shall show me all you have told us of."
-
-There are few countries in which it is more difficult to lay out an
-itinerary that will take in the principal points of interest without
-often doubling on one's track than Spain.  By dint of long calculation
-and nice adjustment of details I sketched a labyrinthian route that my
-kilometer-book, together with what walking I should have time for, would
-cover.  As for my check-book there was left exactly three pesetas a day
-for the remainder of my time in the peninsula.
-
-So one cloudy morning in early August I took train at the Estación del
-Norte and wound away upward through the gorges of the Guardarrama to
-Segovia.  Only there did I realize that the rumble of Madrid had been
-absolutely incessant in my ears; the stillness of the ancient city was
-almost oppressive, even more than in Toledo one felt peculiarly out of
-the world and a sensation that he must not remain too long lest he be
-wholly forgotten and lose his place in life's procession.
-
-In the morning I set off by the highway that follows for some miles the
-great unmortared aqueduct, that chief feature of Segovia, a thing indeed
-far greater than the town, as if a man's gullet, or his thirst should be
-larger than himself, so difficult is it for a city to obtain water in
-this thirsty land.  Where the road abandoned the monument it continued
-across a country brown and sear, with almost the aspect of an American
-meadow in autumn, steadily rising all but imperceptibly. Well on in the
-morning I entered a forest, at a side road of which I was joined by two
-guardias civiles, who marched for an hour with me exchanging information
-and marveling that I had wandered so far afield.  It has been my lot to
-become well, nay, intimately acquainted with the police of many lands,
-and I know of none that, as a body, are more nearly what police should
-be than these civil guards of Spain, to whom is due the suppression of
-all the old picturesque insecurities of the road.  They have neither the
-bully-ism of our own club-wielders nor the childishness of Asiatic
-officers. Except in blistering Bailen the bearing of every pair I
-met--they never travel singly--was such as to win at once the confidence
-of the stranger and to draw out of him such facts as it is their duty to
-learn so naturally that it seemed but a mutual exchange of politenesses.
-There are, no doubt, petty corruptions in so large a body, but in the
-presence of almost any of them one has a conviction that their first
-thought is their duty.
-
-The highway ended its climb at noon in La Granja--The Grange--residence
-of the king in spring and autumn, a town little Spanish in aspect seated
-in a carefully cropped forest at the base of a thickly wooded mountain.
-I roamed unchallenged for half the afternoon through the royal park,
-replete with fountains compared with which those of Versailles are mere
-water-squirts; playthings that Philip the half-mad accused of costing
-three million and amusing him three minutes. I was more fortunate, for
-they cost me nothing and amused me fully half an hour.
-
-After which I picked up the highway again and, winding around the regal
-village, struck upward into the mountains of Guardarrama.  At the hamlet
-of Valsain I had just paused at the public spring when the third or
-fourth tramp I had seen on the road in all Spain swung around a bend
-ahead, marching doggedly northward.  As I stooped to drink, a moan and a
-thud sounded behind me.  I turned quickly around to behold the roadster
-writhing in the middle of the highway, the gravel of which had cut and
-gashed one side of his face.  The simple villagers, swarming wide-eyed
-out of their houses, would have it at first that he was my companion and
-I to blame for his mishap.  He bore patent signs of months on the road,
-being burned a tawny brown in garb and face by the sun that was
-evidently the author of his misfortune.  For a time the village stood
-open-mouthed about him, the brawny housewives now and then giving vent
-to their sympathy and helpless perplexity by a long-drawn "ay de mi!"  I
-suggested water, and a dozen women, dashing away with the agility of
-middle-aged cows, brought it in such abundance that the victim was all
-but drenched to the skin before I could drive them off.  He revived a
-bit and while a woman clumsily washed the blood and gravel from his
-face, I addressed him in all the languages I could muster, for he was
-evidently no Spaniard.  The only response was a few inarticulate groans,
-and when he had been carried to a grassy slope in the shade, I went on,
-knowing him in kind if awkward hands.
-
-A half-perpendicular hour passed by, and I seemed to have left Spain
-behind.  The road was toiling sharply upward through deep forests of
-evergreen, cool as an Alpine valley, opening now and then to offer a
-vista of thick treetops and a glimpse of red-tiled villages; a scene as
-different from sterile, colorless, sunken-cheeked Castille as could well
-be imagined.  Nor did the dusk descend so swiftly in these upper
-heights.  The sun had set when I reached the summit at six thousand feet
-and, passing through the Puerto de Navacerrada, started swiftly downward
-in the thickening gloom; but it was some time before the night had
-settled down in earnest.
-
-I had marched well into it when I was suddenly startled by a sound of
-muffled voices out of the darkness ahead.  I moved forward noiselessly,
-for this lonely pass has many a story to tell.  A dim light shone
-through what appeared to be a window. I shouted for admittance and a
-moment later found myself in the hovel of a peon caminero.
-
-Within, besides the family, were two educated Spaniards, one indeed who
-had been a secretary in the American Legation up to the outbreak of the
-recent war.  When he had been apprised of my mode of travel and my goal,
-he stared wonderingly at me for a moment and then stepped out with me
-into the night.  Marching a few paces down the highway until we had
-rounded some obstruction, he pointed away into the void.
-
-"Do you see those lights?" he asked.
-
-Far away and to the right, so far and so high in the heavens that they
-seemed constellations, twinkled three clusters of lights, almost in a
-row but far separated one from another.
-
-"The third and farthest," said my companion, "is El Escorial; and your
-time is well-chosen, for to-morrow is the day of Saint Lawrence, her
-patron saint."
-
-We returned to the hut, where the wife of the peon was moved to cook me
-a bowl of garbanzos and spread me a blanket on the stone floor.  In the
-morning the sharply descending highway carried me quickly down the
-mountain, and by sunrise I was back once more in the familiar Castille.
-It was verging on noon when, surmounting a sterile rise, I caught sight
-of the dome and towers of the Escorial.  A roadside stream, of which the
-water was lukewarm, removed the grime of travel, and I climbed
-sweltering into the village of Escorial de Arriba, pitched on a jagged
-shoulder of the calcined mountain high above the monastery.
-
-Spain is wont to show her originality and indifference to the
-convenience of travelers, and on this, the anniversary of the grilling
-of him in whose honor it was built, the great monastery was closed for
-the only time during the year.  I experienced no regret, however, for
-the vast gloomy structure against its background of barren, rocky hills
-had far too much the aspect of some dank prison to awaken any desire to
-enter.  Least impressive of famous buildings, the Escorial is certainly
-the most oppressive.  There is poetry, inspiration in many a building,
-in the Taj Mahal, the Cathedral of Cologne; but not in the Escorial.  It
-suggests some frowning, bulky bourgeois of forty whose mother thinks him
-and who would fain believe himself one of the most poetic and spiritual
-of men.
-
-I wandered away the day in the town, drifting in the afternoon down into
-the village "de Abajo." There, in the multitude about the stone-pile of
-a bullring, I ran across Curdito in festive garb.  He was scheduled to
-kill all three bulls of the day's córrida, but in spite of his urgent
-invitation I felt in no mood to sit out the blistering afternoon on a
-bare stone slab of this rough-and-tumble plaza.
-
-El Escorial was so overrun with visitors to her annual celebration that
-not a lodging of any sort was to be had in either the upper or the lower
-village.  The discovery brought me no shock, for a night out of doors I
-neither dreaded nor regretted.  But as I sauntered at dusk down past the
-great building into the flanking "woods of Herrera," I could not but
-wonder how those travelers who bewail the accommodations of the "only
-possible hotel" would have met the situation.
-
-Behind the monastery extends a broad, silent forest, not over thick, and
-beneath the trees squat bushes and brown heather.  I spread the day's
-copy of the _Heraldo_ between two shrubs and, stretching out at my ease,
-fell to munching the lunch I had bought in the village market.  Let the
-circumstances be right and I know few more genuine joys than to sleep
-the night out of doors.  Lie down in the open while a bit of daylight
-still lingers, or awaken there when the dawn has come, and there is a
-feeling of sordidness, mixed with the ludicrous, a sense of being an
-outcast prone on the common earth.  But while the night, obscuring all
-details, hangs its canopy over the world there are few situations more
-pleasing.
-
-When I had listened a while to the panting of the August night I fell
-asleep.  For weeks past I had been viewing too many famous spots,
-perhaps, had been delving too constantly into the story of Spain, My
-constant use of Castilian, too, had borne fruit; English words no longer
-intruded even on my inner meditations.  Was it possible also that the
-market lunch had been too heavy, or the nearness of the gloomy monastery
-too oppressive?  At any rate I fell to dreaming.
-
-At first there passed a procession of all Spain,--arrieros, peasants,
-Andalusian maidens, toreros, priests, Jesús the tramp, a chanting
-water-seller, merchants and beggars; close followed by two guardias
-civiles who looked at me intently as they passed.  Then suddenly in
-their place Moors of every garb and size were dancing about me.  They
-seemed to be celebrating a victory and to be preparing for some
-Mohammedan sacrifice.  A mullah advanced upon me, clutching a knife.  I
-started to my feet, a distant bell boomed heavily, and the throng
-vanished like a puff of smoke.
-
-Away off above, in a hollow in the gaunt mountain, I made out gradually
-the form of a man sitting pensive, elbows on knees, gazing dark-browed
-down upon me.  He was in royal robes, and all at once he seemed to
-start, to grow in size, and a line across his breast expanded to the
-letters "Felipe II."  Larger and larger he grew until he overtowered the
-mountain itself; then slowly, scowlingly he rose and strode down upon
-me.  A women joined him, a scrawny woman who laid a hand inertly in his,
-and I recognized Bloody Mary, who seemed thus in an instant to have
-leaped over the seas from her island kingdom to join her gloomy husband.
-
-In rapid succession new figures appeared,--Herrera first, a torpid,
-lugubrious man strangely like the building he has left behind; then
-quickly a multitude, through which strolled a man whose crown bore the
-name "Pedro," running his sword with a chuckle of devilish laughter
-through any that came within easy reach, young or old, asleep or awake.
-Of a sudden there stalked forth from nowhere a lean, deep-eyed man of
-fifty, a huge parchment volume under one arm, an almost cynical, yet
-indulgent smile on his countenance; and as if to prove who he was there
-raced down over the mountain a man not unlike him in appearance, astride
-a caricature of a horse, and behind him a dumpy, wondering peasant
-ambling on an ass.  The cavalier sprang suddenly from his hack and fell
-affectionately on the shoulder of the parchment-bearer, then bounding
-back into the saddle he charged straight for Felipe, who, stepping to
-one side, flung, backhanded, Mary his wife far out of sight over the
-mountain.
-
-A sound drew my attention to another side. Across the plain was marching
-with stately tread a long file of Moors, each carrying in one hand his
-head, by the hair.
-
-"Los Abencerrajes!" I seemed to shout; and almost before it was uttered
-there remained only Felipe and behind him a score of indistinct forms.
-He waved a hand toward me and turned his back, and the company moved
-down upon me unlimbering a hundred instruments of torture.  Distant
-bells were tolling mournfully.  A priest advanced holding aloft a
-crucifix and chanting in sepulchral voice:
-
-                     "The hour of heretics sounds."
-
-
-Louder and funereally rang the dismal bells; the torturers drew near; I
-struggled to rise to my feet--and awoke.
-
-The bells of the monastery were booming out over the night.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER XI
-
-                            CRUMBLING CITIES
-
-
-It was well along in the next afternoon that I descended at the station
-of Avila and climbed a long dusty mile into the city.  A scent of the
-dim, half-forgotten past hovered over the close-walled, peculiarly
-garbed place.  When I had made a circuit of her ancient wall, through
-which her no less time-worn cathedral thrusts its hips, I drifted down
-into the dusty vega below, where in the church of Santo Tomás sleeps the
-dead hope of "los reyes católicos."  If the sculptor be trustworthy the
-prince would have been an intelligent, kindly lad, even though his
-martial valor might never have rivaled that of his stout-hearted mother.
-Returned to the city, I strolled for an hour along the lofty Paséo del
-Rastro, watching the sun sink red behind the serrated jumble of
-mountains on the far western horizon, beyond which lay my next
-stopping-place; and so to bed in the Posada de la Estrella amid the
-munching asses and snoring arrieros.
-
-Avila is connected with Salamanca by rail, but the route forms a sharp
-angle with its apex many miles to the north.  I had decided, therefore,
-to walk. Swinging down through the western city gate and across the
-babbling Adaja by the aged stone bridge, I clambered again upward to
-where a huge stone cross invites to a rest in its shade and a final
-retrospect of crumbling Avila and her many-turreted, constraining wall.
-An easy two-days' walk lay before me.  For had not Heir Baedeker, so
-seldom in error as to plain facts, announced the distance as thirty-five
-miles?
-
-As I wended on up the hillside, however, I was suddenly stricken profane
-by a stone sign-post rising before me with the dismal greeting:
-
-                       "Salamanca 99 kilómetres."
-
-
-Herr Baedeker was wrong by a little matter of thirty miles.
-
-But I had set the time of my entrance into Salamanca; delay would bring
-havoc to my delicately adjusted itinerary.  I doubled my pace.
-
-The way led through a country as savage of aspect as any in Spain,
-waterless, dusty, glaring, overspread with huge rocks tumbled pell-mell
-as if the Mason of the universe had thrown here the materials left over
-from His building.  By afternoon a few lean farms began to crowd their
-way in between the rocks, now and then a sturdy, thick-set tree found
-place, and over all nature hovered great clouds of locusts whose refrain
-reminded how euphonious is the Spaniard's name for what we dub "dog
-days,"--"canta la chicharra--the locust sings."  The inhabitants of the
-region seemed somewhat more in fortune's favor than the rest of the
-peninsula.  Passing peasants, though rare, had none a hungry look; their
-carts were fancifully carved and painted both on body and wheels, while
-the trappings of their cattle were decorative in the extreme.
-
-All a summer day I tramped forward over hill and hollow toward the great
-jagged range, the hardy trees dying out, the fields growing in size and
-number, but the sierra seeming to hold ever as far aloof.  Beyond a
-small withered forest in which were roaming flocks of brown goats, I
-climbed a steady five miles to a summit village exhibiting every outward
-sign of poverty and most fittingly named "Salvadios--God save us."  The
-keeper of its one quasi-public house deigned after long argument to set
-before me a lame excuse for supper, but loudly declined to furnish
-lodging.  I withdrew, therefore, to a threshing-floor across the way,
-heaped high with still unbroken bundles of wheat, and put in a
-shiveringly cold night--so great is the contrast between the seething
-plains by day and this hilltop bitten by every wind--not once falling
-into a sound sleep for the gaunt, savage curs that prowled about me.
-
-At dawn I was already afoot and three hours later entered the city of
-Penaranda, in the outskirts of which a fine plaza de toros was building,
-but within all the confines of which was no evidence of school, library,
-nor indeed of restaurant.  I contented myself with a bit of fruit and
-trudged on. This may not, perhaps, have been the hottest day of all that
-Spanish summer, but it bore certainly all the earmarks thereof.  The
-earth lay cracked and blistered about me, the trees writhing with the
-heat, the rays rising from the rocky soil like a dense stage-curtain of
-steam.  In a shriveled and parched pueblo of mud huts, exactly
-resembling the villages of Palestine, I routed out a kindly old woman
-for a foreshortened lunch; and then on again in the inferno, choking
-fields of grain and vineyards soon becoming numerous on either hand.
-The wise husbandmen, however, had sought refuge, and in all the grilling
-landscape was not a human being to be seen, save and except a
-sweat-dripping pedestrian from foreign parts straining along the
-scorching highway.
-
-This swung at length to the right, swooped down through a river that had
-not a drop of water, and staggering to the top of an abrupt knoll,
-showed me far off, yet in all distinctness, a rich reddish-brown city
-gathered together on a low hilltop and terminating in glinting spires.
-It was Salamanca; and of all the cities I have come thus upon unheralded
-and from the unpeopled highway none can rival her in richness of color,
-like ripe old wine, a city that has grown old gracefully and with
-increasing beauty.  So fascinating the sight that I sat down beneath the
-solitary tree by the way to gaze upon it--and to swing half round the
-circuit of the shrub as the sun drove the scanty shadow before it.
-
-But I was still far off the golden-brown city and, setting slowly onward
-in the descending evening, I all but encircled the place before the
-carretera, coming upon the ancient puente romano, clambered upward into
-its unrivaled Blaza Mayor.
-
-Just back of this, four stories above the Plaza de la Verduga, or Place
-of the Green Stuff, lives a widow whose little spare chamber is let in
-the winter season to some unpretentious student of the now unpretentious
-university.  I engaged this, together with what of physical nourishment
-should be reasonable, at three pesetas a day.  As I took possession, the
-daughter of the hostess, a muchacha of eight, peered in upon me hugging
-a doll under one arm.
-
-"Qué muñeca más bonita!" I hazarded, which turned out to be unwise, for
-the homage so overcame her diffidence that she came in not only to offer
-the information that my complexion strangely resembled that of a lobster
-in the salmantino museum, but such a fund of further information that it
-was long before I had inveigled her outside the door and, throwing
-myself on the bed, slept the clock round.
-
-As in many another city it had been my fortune to reach Salamanca on the
-eve of one of her great festivals.  Indeed, that must be a foresighted
-traveler who can journey through Spain without being frequently caught
-up in the whirlpool of some local fiesta.  The excuse this time was
-Assumption Day.  The festivities within the city walls offered nothing
-of extraordinary, being chiefly confined to a band concert in the
-central plaza.  Richer by far would be the richest city of the earth
-could she purchase and transplant into her own midst the Plaza Mayor of
-Salamanca, with its small forest of palms, the rich brown medallioned
-façades and surrounding colonnades beneath which the salmantino is wont
-to stroll, la salmantina on his arm, while the band plays in the
-flower-shrouded stand in its center.  Salamanca might sell, too, in
-spite of her boast that it is the finest in Spain, being poorer than the
-proverbial church mouse, were she not also Spanish and prouder than she
-is poor.
-
-The real fiesta, however, took the form of a bullfight that had a
-character all its own. Salamanca, as I have hinted, is no longer a city
-of wealth.  Indeed, those occasions are rare in these modern days when
-she can indulge in a round of the national sport, even though she
-possesses one of the largest bullrings in Spain.  On this great holiday,
-however, the city fathers had decided that nothing within the bounds of
-reason was too good for the recreating of Salamanca's long unfeasted
-children.  A full-sized bullfight would, to be sure, have far
-overstepped the bounds above mentioned. But after long debate and deep
-investigation it had been concluded that a córrida with four bulls, no
-horses, one real matador, and seats of all shades and distinctions at
-one peseta each might be conceded.
-
-With this unlimited choice of vantage-points at my own price I went out
-early to the plaza and picked my place in the sombra in what was
-evidently a section reserved for the guardia civil; for before long the
-guards, in full uniform and their three-cornered hats, began to gather
-about me, first in pairs, then in groups, then in swarms, until I was
-wholly, shut in and surrounded by guardias civiles like a dandelion in
-the center of a bed of tulips. Far from resenting my intrusion, however,
-if such it was, they initiated me into their order with botas and
-cigarettes and included me in their conversation and merriment during
-the rest of the day.
-
-The entertainment began at four.  With that exception, however, it had
-few points of similarity with the regulation córrida.  The procession
-entered, fully six men in torero garb--though that of two or three of
-them fitted like amateur theatrical costumes--followed by two horsemen,
-two, in their shirt-sleeves, as was also señor el alcalde in his box.
-The key thrown, the fight began; with the elimination of the one
-unquestionably unpleasant feature,--the killing of horses.  Even aged
-hacks cost money and, as I have already more than once suggested, money
-is a rare commodity in Salamanca.  When the bull had been worried a bit
-with the cloaks, the banderilleros proceeded at once to plant their
-darts.  The professional matador, a young man rejoicing in the name of
-Trueno--"Thunder"--had, therefore, a far more difficult task than usual,
-for more than anything else it is the venting of his rage and strength
-on the blindfolded steeds that tires the bull, and on this occasion it
-was a still wild and comparatively fresh animal which the diestro was
-called upon to face. He despatched his three allotted bulls, however,
-without accident and to the vociferous satisfaction of the audience,
-which filled even at the low price only a bit more than the shaded
-section.  It was not, as the guardia beside me was at some pains to
-explain, that there were not salmantinos quite sufficient to pack the
-plaza to overflowing, but that there were not pesetas enough in town to
-go round.  In the throng, too, were no small number of peasants from all
-the widely surrounding country, some in the old dress with knee
-breeches.
-
-But to touch upon the unusual features of the córrida.  As a part of the
-worrying of the second bull a chulo placed a chair in the ring and,
-standing upon it with neither weapon nor cloak, awaited the charge.
-When the bull had all but reached him he sprang suddenly into the air,
-the animal dashed under him and, falling upon the unoffending article of
-furniture, dissolved it thoroughly into its component parts and
-scattered them broadcast about the arena.
-
-The most nerve-thrilling performance, however, that it was my privilege
-to see in all the devil-may-care land of Spain was the feat that
-followed immediately on the death of the chair-wrecker.  It was the
-"star attraction" of the day and was announced on the posters in all the
-Spaniard's richness of superlatives--and he is a born and instinctive
-writer of "ads."  Clinging as closely as possible to the eloquent
-phraseology of the original the announcement may be set forth in
-near-English as follows:
-
-"Various are the chances (tricks) which are executed in the different
-plazas of Spain inside the taurine art, but none that has more called
-attention than that which is practised by JOSÉ VILLAR son of the
-memorable matador (killer, murderer) of bulls Villarillo who"--not
-father Illo, who has left off all earthly sport, but son José--"locating
-himself in the center of the arena and placed with the head towards
-below and the feet by above imploring the public to maintain the most
-impressive silence during the risk (fate) consummates the trick (chance)
-of Tancredo; very well, this Management not reflecting on (sparing)
-either expense or sacrifice has contracted with him in order that he
-shall fulfill (lift, pull off; _sic._) this trick (risk) on the third
-bull to the end that the salmantinos shall know it, with which program
-this Management believes to have filled to the full the desires of the
-aficionados (rooters, fans, amateurs)."
-
-The second bull, therefore, having been ignominiously dragged to
-oblivion and the butcher-shop, and the blood patches of the arena
-resanded, there sallied forth from the further gate a small, athletic
-man of thirty-five or so, hatless--and partly hairless--dressed from
-head to foot in the brightest red, of a material so thin that the
-movement of his every muscle could be plainly seen beneath it.  He was
-entirely empty-handed.  He marched with sprightly stride across the ring
-and, bowing low to the alcalde in his box above, addressed to the public
-a warning and an entreaty to maintain the utmost silence during the
-"consummation of the risk."  An assistant then appeared, carrying a
-small wooden box with a piece of gas-pipe six feet long fixed upright in
-the top of it. This Villar placed exactly in the center of the ring, a
-hundred yards or more in every direction from the barrier.  Across the
-gas-pipe, near the top, he fastened a much shorter piece, thus forming a
-cross. On the box he placed a circular roll of cloth, stood on his head
-thereon, hooked his toes over the cross-piece, waved a hand gaily to the
-public, and folded his arms. Every other torero stepped outside the
-ring, and the toril gate swung open.
-
-A wild snort, and there plunged into the arena as powerful and savage a
-brute as it had ever yet been my lot to see.  For an instant he stood
-motionless, blinking in the blinding sunlight.  Then suddenly catching
-sight of the statue flaming with the hated color, he shot away toward it
-with the speed of an express-train--a Spanish express at least--until, a
-bare three feet from it, he stopped instantly stone-still by thrusting
-out his forelegs like a Western broncho, then slowly, gingerly tiptoed
-up to the motionless figure, sniffed at it, and turned and trotted away.
-
-The public burst forth in a thunderclap of applause.  Villar got right
-end up as calmly and gracefully as a French count in a drawing-room,
-laid a hand on his heart, and smiling serenely, bowed once, twice,
-th---- and just then a startled roar went up from the tribunes, for the
-bull had suddenly turned and, espying the man in red, dashed at him with
-lowered horns and a bellow of anger.
-
-There is nowhere registered, so far as my investigations carry, the
-record of José Villar, son of Villarillo, in the hundred-yard dash.  But
-this much may be asserted with all assurance, that it has in it nothing
-of that slow, languid, snail-like pace of the ten-second college
-champion.  Which was well; for some two inches below his flying heels,
-as he set a new record likewise in the vaulting of barriers, the
-murderous horns crashed into the oak plank tablas with the sound of a
-freight collision and an earnestness that gave work to the plaza
-carpenters for some twenty minutes to come.
-
-Therein Villar was more fortunate than the Mexican Tancredo, inventor of
-the "suerte," and for whom it was named.  Tancredo, like Dr. Guillotin,
-was overreached by his own invention, for while his record for the
-hundred was but a second or two less than that of Villar, it was just
-this paltry margin that made him, on the day next following his last
-professional appearance, the chief though passive actor in a spectacle
-of quite a different character.
-
-The "Suerte de Tancredo" has never won any vast amount of popularity in
-Spain, except with the spectators.  Toreros in general manifest a
-hesitation akin to bashfulness in thus seeking the plaudits of the
-multitude.  By reason of which diffidence among his fellows, José, son
-of Villarillo, memorable matador de toros, pockets after each such
-recreation a sum that might not seem overwhelming to an American captain
-of industry or to a world-famous tenor, but one which the average
-Spaniard cannot name in a single breath.
-
-Salamanca's day of amusement did not, however, by any means end here.
-Beneath the name of "Thunder," the professional matador, there was
-printed with equal bombast that of FERNANDO MARTÍN.  Now Fernando was
-quite evidently a salmantino butt, a tall gawky fellow whose place in
-the society of Salamanca was apparently very similar to that of those
-would-be or has-been baseball players to be found vegetating in many of
-our smaller towns.  Like them, too, Fernando was in all probability wont
-to hover about the pool-rooms and dispensing-parlors of his native city,
-boasting of his untested prowess at the national game.  That his talents
-might not, therefore, forever remain hidden under a wineglass, and also,
-perhaps, because his services might be engaged at five hundred pesetas
-less than the five hundred that a professional sobresaliente would have
-demanded, the thoughtful city fathers had caused him to be set down on
-the program, likewise in striking type, as "SUBSTITUTE WITH NECESSITY
-(CON NECESIDAD) TO KILL THE FOURTH BULL."
-
-It was this "necesidad" that worked the undoing of Fernando Martín.
-When the customary by-play had been practised on the fourth animal,
-enter Fernando with bright red muleta, false pigtail, glinting sword,
-and anything but the sure-of-one's-self countenance of a professional
-espada.  He faced the brute first directly in front of the block of
-guardias civiles, and the nearest he came to laying the animal low at
-the first thrust was to impale on a horn and sadly mutilate a sleeve of
-his own gay and rented jacket.  The crowd jeered, as crowds will the
-world over at the sight of a man whose father and mother and even
-grandfather they have known for years trying to prove himself the equal
-of men imported from elsewhere.  Fernando advanced again, maneuvering
-for position, though with a peculiar movement of the knees not usual
-among toreros, and which was all too visible to every eye in the hooting
-multitude.  Trueno, the professional, stuck close at his side in spite
-of the clamorous demand of the public that he leave the salmantino to
-play out his own game unhampered.  Martín hazarded two or three more
-nerveless thrusts, with no other damage, thanks to the watchful eye and
-cloak of Trueno, than one toss of ten feet and a bleeding groin.  By
-this time the jeering of his fellow-townsmen had so overshadowed the
-tyro's modicum of good sense that he turned savagely on his protector
-and ordered him to leave the ring.  Fortunately Trueno was not of the
-stuff to take umbrage at the insults of a foolish man in a rage, or the
-population of Salamanca would incontestably have been reduced by one
-before that merry day was done.
-
-The utmost length of time between the entrance of a professional matador
-for the last act and the death of the bull is four or five minutes.
-Fernando Martín trembled and toiled away ten, twenty, thirty, forty.
-Slowly, but certainly and visibly his bit of courage oozed away; the
-peculiar movement of his knees grew more and more pronounced.  No longer
-daring to meet the bull face to face, he skulked along the barrier until
-the animal's tail was turned and, dashing past him at full speed,
-stabbed backward at his neck as he ran, to the uproarious merriment of
-the spectators.  Trueno saved his life certainly a score of times.  At
-last, when the farce had run close upon fifty minutes, a signal from the
-alcalde sent across the arena the sharp note of a bugle, two
-_cabestros_, or trained steers were turned into the ring, and the bull,
-losing at once all belligerency, trotted docilely away with them.  The
-star of Fernando Martín, would-be matador de toros, was forever set, and
-if he be not all immune to ridicule his native city surely knows him no
-more.
-
-It is law that no bull that has once entered the ring shall live.
-Curious to know what was to be the fate of this animal, I sprang over
-the barrier and hurried across to the gate by which he had disappeared.
-There I beheld a scene that forever dispelled any notion that the task
-of the matador is an easy one, however simple it may look from the
-tribunes.  The bull was threshing to and fro within a small corral,
-bellowing with rage and lashing the air with his tail.  It required six
-men and a half-hour of time to lasso and drag him to the fence.  With a
-hundred straining at the rope his head was drawn down under the gate, a
-man struck him several blows with a sledge, and another, watching his
-opportunity, swung his great navaja and laid wide open the animal's
-throat.
-
-It was late when, having mingled for some time with the country folk
-dancing on the sandy plain before the plaza, I returned to the city for
-my bundle and repaired to the station.  A twelve-hour ride was before
-me.  For I had decided to explore a territory where even the scent of
-tourists is unknown,--the northwest province of Galicia.
-
-The train that I boarded at eleven was crowded with countrymen returning
-from the day's festival, a merry but in no sense intoxicated company, in
-which I saw my first wooden-shod Galicians.  The car was, for once, of
-the American pattern--though of Spanish width--with thirty seats each
-large enough for three persons.  The brakeman, too, who stood lantern on
-arm in the open door, bore an unusual resemblance to an American
-"shack."
-
-A dozen men were standing in the aisle, but to my surprise one seat near
-the center of the car seemed to be unoccupied.  When I reached it,
-however, I found a priest stretched out on his back, his hands clasped
-over his paunch, snoring impressively.  I carried a protest to the
-brakeman and with a snort he swooped down upon the sleeper.  At sight of
-him, however, he recoiled.
-
-"Carajo!" he cried.  "Es un padre!  I could n't disturb his reverence."
-
-I stooped and touched the monopolist on the shoulder, being in no mood
-to remain standing all night.  Moreover, I had long been curious to know
-the Spaniard's attitude toward a man who should treat a priest as an
-ordinary human being.  "His reverence" grunted.  I touched him again.
-His snore lost a beat or two and began once more.  I shook him more
-forcibly.  He opened his blood-shot eyes, snorted "Huh!" so much like a
-certain monopolist of the animal kingdom that even the passengers about
-me laughed at the resemblance--and fell again to snoring.  I sat down
-gently on his fat legs and, when he kicked me off, confiscated a place.
-He sat up with the look of a man whose known world has suddenly crumbled
-about his ears and glared at me with bulging eyes a full two minutes,
-while over the faces of the onlookers flitted a series of winks and
-smiles.
-
-He was just huddling himself up again in the two-thirds of the seat that
-remained to him when the door opened and Trueno, the matador, his little
-_coleta_ peeping out from beneath his hat, his sword-case under one arm,
-entered and, spying the extra place, sat down in it with scant ceremony.
-We fell to talking.  The torero was a jovial, explosive, devil-may-care
-fellow who looked and dressed his character well.  The priest slunk off
-somewhere in the thickest hours and his place was taken by a peasant who
-had been standing near me since leaving Salamanca. When he found
-opportunity to break into the conversation he addressed me with an
-amused smile:
-
-"You are not then a Catholic, señor?"
-
-"No."
-
-"Ah!  A socialist!" he cried with assurance.
-
-For to the masses of southern Europe socialist and non-Catholic are
-synonymous.
-
-"I doubt, señor," I observed, "whether you yourself are a Catholic."
-
-"Cómo, señor!" he cried, raising his hands in a comical gesture of
-quasi-horror.  "I, a cristino viejo, no Catholic!"
-
-"Do you go to church and do what your cura commands?"
-
-"What nonsense!" he cried, using a still more forcible term.  "Who does?
-My wife goes now and then to confession.  I go to church, señor, to be
-baptized, married, and buried."
-
-"Why go then?"
-
-"Caramba!" he gasped.  "How else shall a man be buried, married, and
-baptized?"
-
-Toward morning I fell into a doze, from which I was awakened by the
-extraordinary sensation of feeling cold.  Dawn was touching the far
-horizon.  The train was straining upward through a sharply rising
-country.  As the sun rose we came in sight of Astorga, standing drearily
-on her bleak hilltop, and in memory of Gil Blas and for the unlimbering
-of my legs I alighted and climbed into the town.  It proved as
-uninteresting as any in Spain, and before the morning was old I was
-again riding northwestward. Soon there came an utter change of scene;
-tunnels grew unaccountable, the railroad winding its way doggedly upward
-through a wild, heavily wooded mountain region that had little in common
-with familiar Spanish landscapes.  In mid-afternoon I dismounted at the
-station of Lugo, the capital of Galicia.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XII
-
-                             WILDEST SPAIN
-
-
-Nearest of all the Iberian peninsula to our own land, the ancient
-kingdom of Galicia is as well-nigh unknown to us as any section of
-Europe. As far back as mankind's memory carries it has been Spain's
-"last ditch."  Up into this wild mountain corner of the peninsula
-retreated in its turn each subdued race as conqueror after conqueror
-swept over the land,--the aboriginal Iberians before the Celts, the
-Celtiberians before the coast-hugging Phoenicians and Carthaginians,
-these before the omniverous Romans, followed as the centuries rolled on
-by Vandal, Suevi, Goth and Moor.  Further they could not flee, for
-behind them the world falls away by sheer cragged cliffs into the
-fathomless sea.  Here the fugitives melted together into a racial
-amalgam, an uncourageous amalgam on the whole, for in each case those
-who reached the fastnesses were that remnant of the race that preferred
-life to honor, those who "fought and ran away," or who took to their
-heels even earlier in the proceedings.
-
-Yet it was a long two centuries after Hannibal had followed his father
-Hasdrubal into the Stygian realms of the defeated, after Rome had
-covered the rest of the peninsula with that network of roads that
-remains to this day, that the power of the outside world pushed its way
-into this tumbled wilderness.  But for the necessity of loot to pay the
-gambling debts of his merry youth the conqueror indeed might never have
-appeared.  Yet appear he did,--a young Roman just beginning to display a
-crownal baldness, known to his legions as Caesar and answering to his
-friends of the Roman boulevards and casinos to the name of Julius.  He
-conquered; and when he, too, had written his memoirs and passed his
-perforated way, that lucky heir of all Roman striving caused to be built
-in these his mountains a city that should--like all that sprouted or
-grew under his reign--bear his name,--"Lucus Augusti--Gus's place."
-
-To-day it is Lugo, a modest city ensconced in the lap of a plain near a
-thousand feet above the railway station that bears its name.
-Politically Spanish, it is so in little else.  The last traces of the
-Arab, so indelible in the rest of the peninsula, have disappeared.  The
-racial amalgam, now the gallego, is close akin to the Portuguese, like
-all long dominated peoples docile, unassertive, born to be a servant to
-mankind.  He is the chief butt, the low comedian of the Spanish stage,
-slow, loutish, heavy of mind and body, without a suggestion of the fire
-of that bubbling child of enthusiasm, the Andaluz; none of the native
-dignity and consciousness of personal worth of the Castilian, not even
-the dreaminess of the Manchegan.  He is fitted to be what he is,--the
-domestic, the server of his fellow-countrymen.
-
-From the posada at the city gate I climbed to Lugo's chief promenade and
-Alameda, the top of her surrounding wall.  This is some forty feet high,
-of flat, irregular slabs of slate-stone on Roman foundations, with a
-circuit of nearly a mile and a half.  The town within and below is of
-the same material, the dull gray or drab so predominating as to give the
-place the somberness of a stone village of Wales.  The inhabitants,
-moreover, have little of the Spaniard's love of color, being as sober in
-garb as in demeanor.  It is noteworthy that those communities that are
-least embellished by nature are most prone to garb themselves in all the
-colors of the spectrum.  The Venetian above his muddy water has been
-noted in all times as a colorist; the peasants of the Apennines barely a
-hundred miles away have very little brightness of dress.
-
-So the Lugense; for if the town itself is somber gray, the moss and
-vines that overrun the low, leaden houses, the gardens scattered among
-them, the flowers that trail from the windows of the dwellings built
-medieval-fashion into the walls make the scene gay even within.  While
-outwardly it is unsurpassed.  From the wall-top promenade the eye
-commands an endless vista of richest green landscape, a labyrinth of
-munificent hill forms and mountain ridges dense-wooded with veritable
-Alpine forests rolling away on every side to the uttermost horizon.
-
-In the town itself is almost nothing of what the tourist calls "sights";
-which is, perhaps, a chief reason why his shadow almost never falls
-within it. There is only the dull, bluish-stone cathedral, and an
-atmosphere wholly individual; nothing exciting, nothing extraordinary,
-though one amusing detail of life is sure to attract attention.  Like
-many towns of Spain, Lugo obtains her water through the mouths of stone
-lions in her central plaza.  But here the fountain spouts are for some
-Gallegan reason high above the flagging, far out of reach.  Whence the
-plaza and the streets of the city are at all hours overrun with
-housewives and domestics carrying not merely pitchers but a tin tube
-some ten feet long through which to conduct the water into their
-receptacles.  In nothing does the town differ from familiar Spain more
-than in temperature.  Her climate is like that of Bar Harbor.  A change
-in a few hours as from Florida in August to Mount Desert brought quickly
-home to me the fact that my garb was fitted only for perpetual summer.
-Almost with the setting sun I fell visibly to shivering, and by dark I
-was forced to take refuge in bed.
-
-I had come into Galicia proposing to strike across country to Oviedo,
-capital of the Asturias, in the hope of getting wholly and thoroughly
-"off the beaten track."  Therein I seemed fully to have succeeded.
-Inquiries in Lugo elicited the information that Oviedo was reputed to
-lie somewhere to the eastward.  Nothing more; except some nebulous
-notion of a highway beginning at the base of the city wall leading for a
-day or two in that direction. For which uncertainty I was in no sense
-sorry, delighted with the prospect of exploring by a route of my own
-that wooded wilderness of mountains that spreads endlessly away from
-Lugo's promenade, certain of finding a land and a people unsullied by
-tourists.
-
-Dinner over on the day after my arrival, I descended from the city of
-Augustus by the unpaved road that was to set me a little way on my
-journey. It was soon burrowing through dense, scented forests, broken by
-scores of little deep green meadows along the way; so many and so
-inviting that it required a strong tug of the will to keep from lying
-down for a nap in each of them, in memory of the many grassless,
-siestaless, fly-bitten days in the rest of the peninsula.  Truly the
-good things of this world are unevenly distributed.  In fact, only by a
-dead lift of the imagination could one comprehend that this also was
-Spain.  Switzerland, perhaps, but never a part and portion of the same
-country with the sear, deforested uplands of Castille, the sandy
-stretches of Andalusia, with osseous and all but treeless La Mancha.
-The division line between Europe and Africa was meant surely to be the
-Pyrenees and this Cantabrian range rather than the Mediterranean.
-
-When darkness settled down I halted at a jumbled stone hamlet, where
-payment was refused except for the few cents' worth of peasant fare I
-ate.  For my bed, was spread in an open stable a bundle of newly
-threshed wheat-straw that was longer than myself. A half-day's tramp had
-not left me sleepy.  The night lay cool and silent about me, and I sank
-into that reverie of contentment that comes most surely upon the
-wanderer when he has left the traveled world behind and turns his face
-care-free toward the unknown, that mysterious land across which beckons
-the aërial little sprite men name _Wanderlust_. For the joy of travel is
-not in arriving but in setting forth, in moving onward; how fast matters
-little, where, even less, but ever on and on, forgetting, for the
-supremest satisfaction, that there is a goal to attain.  Let a man
-wander away into unknown lands smiling with summer, his journey's end
-little more than conjecture, his day of arrival a matter of
-indifference, and if he feel not then the joy of the open road he may
-know for a certainty that he is a hug-the-hearth, and no gipsy and a
-vagabond.
-
-In the morning continued a roadway hobble-skirted by forests, a country
-as pleasing as Caruso's voice, as soothing to the traveler from stony
-Spain as McDowell's music.  To enumerate the details of life and
-landscape here is merely to tell by contrast what the rest of Spain is
-not.  The inhabitants were in the highest degree laconic, as taciturn as
-the central and southern Spaniard is garrulous, self-conscious to the
-point of bashfulness, a characteristic as uncommon in the rest of the
-country as among the Jews or Arabs; a heavy-handed, unobserving
-peasantry that passed the stranger unaccosted, almost unnoticed.  Such
-conversation as exchanged must be introduced by the traveler.  The
-cheering "Vaya!" was heard no more, the stock greeting being a mumbled
-"Buenos."
-
-In appearance, be the inspection not too close, this mountain people
-well deserves the outworn epithet "picturesque."  The women young and
-old wore on their heads large kerchiefs of brilliant red, and most of
-them a waist of the same color, offering striking contrast to the rich
-green background, as the latter was sure to be.  As footwear, except
-those unpossessed of any, both sexes had wooden shoes painted black and
-fancifully carved, which, scraping along the highway, carried the
-thoughts quickly back to Japan.  At nearer sight, however, something of
-the picturesqueness was lost in the unfailing evidences of a general
-avoidance of the bath and washtub.
-
-Of least interest were the dwellings of this peasantry,--villages
-neither frequent nor large, more properly mere heaps of gray huts built
-without order or plan of the slate-stone of which the province itself is
-chiefly formed, as was seen wherever the outer soil had been stripped
-away and the skeleton of the mountain laid bare.  For all the character
-of the country abundance of rain and a pains-taking agriculture gave
-good crops.  Galicia indeed supports, though in poverty, the densest
-population of the peninsula.  Wheat, Indian corn, and hay abounded.  The
-former was stacked, and threshed with flails--two customs unknown in
-Spain, as the latter products are entirely.  The maize was sown. A
-species of cabbage on a stalk some two feet long was among the most
-common of the vegetables.
-
-All these products grew, not on the level, but in little isolated,
-precipitous fields in which it seemed impossible that the laborers, male
-and female with sickles or mattocks, could stand upright.  Flocks of
-sheep and goats were many, and as the final change from the Spain that I
-had hitherto known there was nowhere silence.  The forests on either
-hand were vocal with the songs of birds.  Mountain streams came
-plunging, headlong down the ravines, or brawled along through stony
-channels beside the winding way.  The water was of the purest and
-clearest, which may, perhaps, have led the inhabitants to give most of
-their mundifying attention to the vessels in which it was
-carried,--great oaken buckets each with three wide hoops scoured
-spotless and shining as a Hindu's _lota_.
-
-But most unfailing breakers of the silence and most characteristic of
-all the features of the province was its vehicles.  The Phrygian
-peasants who dragged their produce into Troy before the siege had
-certainly as up-to-date a conveyance.  The traveler's first encounter
-with one of these Homeric contrivances is sure to be startling.  There
-is only one word that exactly expresses their sound from afar,--the
-French _bourdonner_--the noise of the bumblebee. Indeed, when first I
-heard it I fell to threshing about my ears, sure that one of those
-insects was upon me.  Slowly the sound grew to the meowling of a
-thousand cats, and around a turn of the forest-hedged road came a
-peasant's cart drawn by little brown oxen--they are as often cows--much
-like our Jerseys in appearance, a great sheepskin thrown over their
-heads, to the horns of which the yoke was fastened.  The unwieldy
-edifice, wabbling drunkenly as it came, consisted of little more than
-two solid disks of wood like cistern covers turning on a wooden axle,
-the whole having about it neither an ounce of iron nor a smell of
-axle-grease. Its pace certainly did not exceed a mile an hour, the oxen
-see-sawing from side to side of the road, twisting their burdened heads
-to stare at me with curious, sad eyes.  As it passed, my ears literally
-ached with its scream.  I doubled my pace to flee the torture.  But
-there was no entire escape; hardly once thereafter was I out of sound of
-a cart or two, now screaming by, now "bourdonning" away across some
-valley, buzzing at times even after the night had settled down.
-
-Early on this second day, which was Sunday, there appeared a far more
-precipitous and rocky country through which the road began to wind its
-way upward amid a chaos of rugged tumbled valleys, gaining by early
-afternoon an elevation above the line of vegetation.  For two hours I
-kept lookout for a bit of level space for a siesta, without finding a
-patch of flat ground as large as my knapsack.  I stepped over the edge
-of the highway and lay down on a bank so sheer that I was obliged to
-brace my stick against the small of my back to keep from pitching down
-the thousand-foot slope into a brook; and even as it was I awoke to find
-I had shifted some ten feet down the hill.
-
-The ascent thereafter grew still sharper, the surrounding world being at
-last wholly enveloped in a dense cloud.  From out of this I heard, at
-what I fancied must be toward sunset, sounds of revelry, by which,
-marching onward, I was soon encompassed, though still unseeing and
-unseen.  Suddenly there came waltzing toward me out of the fog a couple
-in each other's arms, disappearing again as another pair whirled forth
-out of the unknown.  Wandering on through a merry but invisible
-multitude I ran all but into the arms of two guardias civiles leaning on
-their muskets.  They greeted me with vast surprise, welcoming me to
-their mountain-top town of Fonsagrada and, far from demanding my papers,
-offered to find me a partner that I might join the village in its Sunday
-celebration on the green.  I declined such hilarity, but for an hour
-stood chatting with them while the dancers whirled unseen about us.
-
-Fonsagrada has no regular accommodations for strangers.  The
-peregrinating band of musicians, however, furnishing the day's melody,
-was to be cared for in a sort of grocery, to which I repaired with them
-when the dance was over.  Having partaken of a substantial supper in
-which the far-famed _bacalao_--cod preserved in great chunks in barrels
-like salt pork; a main staple in this region--made its initial
-appearance, I laid my case before the proprietor.  He was a Yankee-like
-man in the middle thirties, of modern business methods even though he
-knew next to nothing of the world outside his cloud-bound village.
-Notwithstanding, therefore, that there was no "costumbre" to sanction
-it, he bade me spend the night under his roof--which I did all too
-literally, for when I had left off swapping yarns with the melodious
-nomads my host led the way to the garret, half-filled with straw, where
-in the midst of a too realistic dream I rose up suddenly and all but
-shattered my head on the roof in question.
-
-In the morning the clouds were still wandering like lost souls through
-the streets of Fonsagrada.  A mist that barely escaped being a rain was
-falling when I set off in an attempt to follow the voluminous directions
-of the dubious village.  According to these, when I had passed the
-"Mesón de Galo," a lonely stone tavern a few miles out, I left the road,
-which was bending toward Gijón on the north coast, and fell into a
-descending mountain path.  A tang of the salt sea was in the air.  All
-the day through I climbed, slipped, and scrambled over jagged mountain
-slopes and through deep, rocky barrancas.  There develops with much
-wandering an instinct to follow the right fork of a mountain trail,
-slight hints that could not be explained, but without the
-half-unconscious noting of which I must have gone a score of times
-astray.  Twice or thrice I stumbled into a hamlet in some wrinkle of the
-range, a village of five or six hovels huddling in the shadow of an
-enormous, overtowering church, all built of flat field stones and
-swarming with huge white dogs.
-
-At Grandas, a bit larger village overhung by massed up mountains, I was
-at length so fortunate as to get after much search an intangible
-imitation of a meal.  From there I panted a long time upward and came
-out at last above a seemingly bottomless gorge, a gorge so deep that I
-had scrambled nearly a half-hour along its brink before I noted that far
-down in its depths was a town, encircled by vertical vineyards, like
-embroidery on the lower skirts of its overhanging mountains.  My path
-lay plainly visible on the opposite slope, only a long jump away, but a
-jump for Pegasus or the princess of the Rosstrappe, and I, mere mortal,
-was forced to wind a long hour and a half to and fro on the rubbled face
-of the mountain before I entered the town below, called Saline.
-
-Before me lay the most laborious task of all my Spanish journey.  A
-mountain as nearly perpendicular as man could hope to ascend, without a
-break or a knoll in all its slope, rose, a sheer wall, certainly four
-thousand feet above.  The gorge seemed some boundary set by the gods
-between two worlds.  Up the face of the cliff a path had been laid out
-with mathematical precision, every one of its score of legs a toilsome
-climb over loose stones, with the sun, untempered by a breath of wind,
-pouring down its fury upon my back.  It was hot as Spain in the depth of
-the canyon; it was chilling cold when I reached the summit heavily
-crested in clouds and threw myself down breathless on my back.  Darkness
-was coming on, and I fell soon to shivering in the biting mountain air
-and must rise and hurry forward.  It was not strange that in the fog and
-darkness instinct failed and that when finally I reached a village of
-eight or nine hovels and inquired its name the inhabitants replied
-"Figuerina," not in the least like the "La Mesa" I had expected.
-
-Of a brawny, weather-beaten girl milking a cow by the light of a torch
-in what passed for the principal street, I asked:
-
-"Is there a posada in town?"
-
-"No sé, señor," she answered.
-
-"Don't know!  When your town has only nine houses?"
-
-But she only stared dully at me through the gloom, and I carried my
-inquiry elsewhere.  With no better result, however, for each one I asked
-returned the same laconic, "I don't know."  I had sat down on a boulder
-in the center of the hamlet to puzzle over this strange ignorance when a
-strapping mountaineer approached through the darkness and led me with
-few words to the house of the head man.  The latter was in bed with a
-broken leg, having had the misfortune to fall off his farm a few days
-before.  I was taken before him as he lay propped up with pillows and,
-after a few brief questions, he commanded his family to make me at home.
-
-Only at a distance are these mountain hamlets of northern Spain
-inviting.  For the good people live, indoors and out, in peace and
-equality with their pigs and chickens, not because they are by nature
-unclean, but because they know no other life than this, nor any reason
-why their domestic animals should not be treated as equals.  The wife of
-the village chief led me into the living-room and kitchen.  I knew it
-was that, for she said so.  The place was absolutely dark.  Since
-leaving Lugo I had not seen a pane of glass, and lamps of any sort
-appear to be unknown in these hamlets of the Sierra de Rañadoiro. There
-was, to be sure, a bit of fire in one corner, but it gave not the
-slightest illumination, only a thick smoke that wandered about looking
-for an exit, and unsuccessfully, for there was nothing whatever in the
-way of chimney, and the door had been closed as we entered.  Smoker
-though I am, I began to weep and did not once leave off while I remained
-in the room.
-
-The mustiness of a dungeon assailed the nostrils; the silence was broken
-by a continual droning.  The floor was stone.  In the room were six or
-eight men and women, as I discovered little by little from their voices.
-Supper was announced, and a match I struck showed an indistinct group of
-which I was a part humped over a steaming kettle in the center of the
-floor.  Into this all began to dip their bread. I hung back, which the
-wife discovering by some instinct, she made an exclamation I did not
-understand and soon after there was thrust into my hands a private bowl
-of the concoction.
-
-It turned out to be a "caldo gallego"--an all but tasteless thick soup
-of which the chief ingredient, besides water, is the long-stemmed
-cabbage indigenous to the region.  A spoon was then handed me. It was of
-wood, homemade, and flat as a canoe-paddle. What most aroused my wonder
-was the bread. A glimpse I had caught of it in the flicker of my match
-seemed to show a loaf of about the size of a large grindstone--though I
-charged this to optical illusion--from which wedges were cut, one of
-them being laid in my lap.  It was coarse as mortar, yet as savory, and
-proved later to be as sustaining a bread as I have yet run across on the
-earth.  This and the caldo being no match for a mountain-climbing
-appetite, I asked the privilege of buying a bowl of milk.  From my
-unseen companions arose many ejaculations of wonder that I could afford
-such a luxury, but a bowl of it was soon put in my hands. A better milk
-I never broke bread in.
-
-Still I was at a loss to account for the incessant droning in the room,
-like the croak of a distant ox-cart.  Since my entrance, too, I had been
-struck a thousand times lightly in the face, as with bread crumbs or the
-paper-wads indigenous to the old country schoolhouse.  When it occurred
-to me to put the two mysteries together both were solved.  The flies
-were so thick in the room that they made this sound in flying blindly
-back and forth.
-
-But once upstairs the dwelling assumed a new rating.  Here was, it is
-true, no luxury; but the rough-fashioned chamber, partly store-room and
-partly spare bedroom, was capacious and clean, of the rough, unused sort
-of cleanliness of a farmer's "best room," opened only on extraordinary
-occasions. The one sheet of the massive bed was as stiff as any
-windjammer's mainsail, the blanket as rough as the robe of a Cistercian
-monk.  Among a score of multiform articles stored in the room was a
-stack of bread such as I had eaten below, some forty loaves each fully
-as large as a half-bushel measure.  It is baked from four to six months
-ahead, twice or thrice a year, and has a crust hard and impervious as a
-glazed pot, which keeps it fresh and savory for an almost unlimited
-period.
-
-As I bade farewell to my host next morning I held out to him two
-pesetas.  He resented the offer as an Arab or a Castilian might have,
-but being of those accustomed to express themselves less in words than
-in actions, did so laconically.  When I offered it again he rose half up
-on his elbows and bellowed "No!"  His gruffness was in no sense from
-anger, but merely his mode of speaking emphatically, and a way of hiding
-that bashfulness so common to mountaineers, who are usually, as here, a
-shy and kindly people with much more genuine benevolence than grace of
-manner.  I protested that I should at least be permitted to pay for my
-extravagance, the milk, arguing that even a wanderer on his feet was
-better able to spare a peseta than a village chief on his back.  But he
-roared "No!" again, and furthermore commanded his wife to cut me a wedge
-of the longevious bread, "to carry me over the day."
-
-Once escaped from the tangle of inhabited stone-piles, I strode away
-down rock-jumbled ravines, one close succeeding another and carrying me
-all but headlong downward.  In the depths of the third I risked a plunge
-into a mountain brook, though the water was icy and the air still almost
-wintry cold. The day was warming, however, by the time I descended upon
-the hamlet of Berducedo, where I got fried eggs and a new highway.
-
-To chronicle the vagaries of the latter during the rest of the day would
-be a thankless task.  For miles it wound around and upward, ever upward
-on the face of bare stony mountains like a spiral stairway to heaven.
-Then suddenly from each giddy height it dived headlong down into
-deep-wooded, fertile valleys; then up again round and round another
-mountain shoulder far beyond the last stunted shrub. Later in the day it
-took to rounding these peaks almost on the level, coming a score of
-times so close to itself that I could all but toss my bundle across,
-only to buckle back upon itself for miles around some narrow but
-apparently bottomless gulley.
-
-Somewhere during the previous afternoon I had crossed the unmarked
-boundary between Galicia and the still more rugged kingdom of Asturias,
-to-day the province of Oviedo.  A new style of architecture gradually
-became prevalent.  The buildings were of two stories, the lower, of
-stone, housing the animals, while the dwelling proper was of wood and
-perched a foot or more above the lower story on four cone-shaped
-cornerstones, like some great awkward bird ready to take flight.
-
-But for this peculiarity the village in which night overhauled me
-differed but little from that of the evening before, except in being
-many hundred feet nearer sea level.  It was called San Fecundo.  As
-before, my inquiry for an inn was each time answered by a terse "I don't
-know."  I found the head man in good health, however,--a stalwart fellow
-little past thirty who was shoveling manure in his front yard. Yet so
-local is the dialect of every village in this region that I tried for
-some time in vain to make known my wants to him.
-
-"Can't you speak Spanish, señor?" I cried out.
-
-"No, señor," he replied like the report of a gun, and apparently angered
-at the allegation.  We managed nevertheless by patience and repetition
-to establish communication between us, and I found out at last why my
-inquiry for a posada had evoked so surprising an answer.  Public
-hostelries being unknown among them, the mountaineers understand the
-question "Is there an inn in town?" to mean "Do you suppose any resident
-will furnish me accommodations?"
-
-The head man did in this case, in spite of my unfortunate blunder in
-calling him a gallego.  So great is the sectionalism in these Cantabrian
-ranges that a man from one village deeply resents even being taken for a
-resident of another a mile distant; while the Asturians, a blending of
-the aboriginal Iberian and the Goth, in whose caves of Covadonga was
-kept alight the last flicker of Spanish liberty and Christianity,
-consider themselves free and independent hidalgos infinitely superior to
-the submissive gallego. There were in truth some noticeable differences
-of character and customs, that were to increase as I advanced.
-
-We spent the evening in another ventless, smoky, fly-buzzing kitchen,
-though this time the fireplace gave a bit of blaze and from time to time
-the rugged faces of the eight or ten men, who had gathered at the
-invitation of the village leader, flashed visible. I entertained them
-with such stories of America as are most customary and popular on such
-occasions. This was no light task.  Not only were there many words
-entirely indigenous to the village, but such Castilian as my hearers
-used would scarcely be recognized in Castille.  The expression "For
-allà" (over there) they reduced to "Pa cá"; "horse" was never "caballo,"
-but either "cabalo" or "cabayo."  Worst of all, the infinitive of the
-verb served indifferently for all persons and tenses.  "Yo ir" might
-mean "I go," "I was going," "I shall go," "I should go" and even "I
-would have gone" and "I should be going."
-
-Most taking of all the stories I could produce were those concerning the
-high buildings of New York.  I had developed this popular subject at
-some length when a mountaineer interposed a question that I made out at
-length to be a query whether those who live in these great houses spend
-all their time in them or take an hour or two every morning to climb the
-stairs.
-
-"Hay ascensores, señores," I explained, "elevators; some expresses, some
-mixtos, as on your railroads."
-
-A long, unaccountable silence followed.  I filled and lighted my pipe,
-and still only the heavy breathing of the untutored sons of the hills
-about me sounded.  Finally one of them cleared his throat and inquired
-in humble voice:
-
-"Would you be so kind, señor, as to tell us what is an elevator?"
-
-It was by no means easy.  Long explanation gave them only the conception
-of a train that ran up and down the walls of the building.  How this
-overcame the force of gravity I did not succeed in making clear to them;
-moreover there was only one of the group that had ever seen a train.
-
-In the morning the head man accepted with some protest two
-_reales_--half a peseta.  The highway again raced away downward,
-describing its parabolas and boomerang movements as before, and
-gradually bringing me to a realization of how high I had climbed into
-the sky.  On every hand rocky gorges and sheer cliffs; now and again a
-group of charcoal-burners on the summit of a slope stood out against the
-dull sky-line like Millet's figures--for the sun was rarely visible.  As
-I descended still lower, more pretentious, red-roofed villages appeared,
-and by mid-afternoon I entered the large town of Tineo. As I was leaving
-one of its shops a courtly youth introduced himself as a student in the
-University of Valladolid, and as he knew a bit of English it was with no
-small difficulty that I resisted his entreaties to talk that tongue with
-him in the mile or two he walked with me.  That night for the first time
-since leaving Lugo I paid for my lodging in a public posada.
-
-Salas, a long town in a longer green valley, was so far down and
-sheltered that figs sold--by number here rather than weight--nine for a
-cent.  Beyond, the highway strolled for miles through orchards of apples
-and pears, while figs dropped thick in the road and were trodden under
-foot.  For the first time I understood the force of the expression, "not
-worth a fig."
-
-In the wineshop where I halted for an afternoon lunch I got the shock of
-that summer's journey. Casually I picked up the first newspaper I had
-seen in a week; and stared a full moment at it unbelieving. The entire
-front page was taken up by a photograph showing Posadas lying in bed,
-his familiar face gaunt with pain, and about him his father, a priest,
-and a fellow-torero.
-
-"Carajo!" I gasped.  "What's this; Posadas wounded?"
-
-"Más," replied the innkeeper shortly.  "Killed last Sunday.  Too bad; he
-made good sport for the aficionados."
-
-An accompanying article gave particulars.  The Sevillian had been
-engaged to alternate with a well-known diestro in the humble little
-plaza of San Lucar de Barrameda on the lower reaches of the
-Guadalquivir. The end of the day would have seen him a graduate matador.
-The bulls were "miúras" five years old.  As he faced the first, Posadas
-executed some pass that delighted the spectators.  For once, evidently,
-he forgot his one "secret of success"; he turned to acknowledge the
-applause.  In a flash the animal charged and gored him in the neck.  He
-tried to go on, poised his sword, and fainted; and was carried to the
-little lazaret beneath the amphitheater, while the festival continued.
-Toward morning he died.
-
-All this had passed while I was climbing into the cloud-cloaked village
-of Fonsagrada, two weeks to an hour since I had last seen the skilful
-Sevillian in the ring.  The article ended with the vulgarity common to
-the yellow journal tribe:
-
-"We have paid the dying Posadas one thousand pesetas for the privilege
-of taking this picture, which is almost all the unfortunate torero left
-his sorrowing family."
-
-I trudged on deep in such reflections as such occurrences awaken, noting
-little of the scene.  At sunset I found myself tramping through a
-warmer, less abrupt country, half conscious of having passed Grado, with
-its palaces, nurse-girls, and conventional costumes.  As dusk fell I
-paused to ask for an inn. "A bit further on," replied the householder.
-I continued, still pensive.  Several times I halted, always to receive
-the same reply, "A bit further, señor."  Being in no sense tired, I gave
-the matter little attention until suddenly the seventh or eighth
-repetition of the unveracity aroused a touch of anger and a realization
-that the night was already well advanced. A lame man hobbling along the
-dark road gave me once more the threadbare answer, but walked some two
-miles at my side and left me at the door of a wayside wineshop that I
-should certainly not have missed even without him.
-
-The chief sources of the boisterousness within were three young
-vagabonds who were displaying their accomplishments to the gathering.
-One was playing tunes on a comb covered with a strip of paper, another
-produced a peculiarly weird music in a high falsetto, while the third
-was a really remarkable imitator of the various dialects of Spain.  With
-the three I ascended near midnight to the loft of the building, where a
-supply of hay offered comfortable quarters.  For an hour he of the
-falsetto sat smoking cigarettes and singing an endless ditty of his
-native city, the refrain of which rang out at frequent intervals:
-
-    "Más bonita que hay,
-    A Zaragoza me voy
-    Dentro de Ar-r-r-rago-o-ón."
-
-
-It was with genuine regret that I noted next morning the reapproach of
-civilization.  Rough as is the life of these mountaineers of the north
-their entire freedom from convention, the contact with real men who know
-not even what pose and pretense are, the drinking into my lungs of the
-exhilarating mountain air had made the trip that was just ending by far
-the most joyful portion of all my Spanish experiences.  Not since the
-morning I climbed into Astorga had I heard the whine of a beggar; not
-once in all the northwest had I caught the faintest scent of a tourist.
-The trip had likewise been the most inexpensive, for in the week's tramp
-I had spent less than twelve pesetas.
-
-A few hours more down the mountainside brought me into Oviedo, where I
-took up my abode in the Calle de la Luna.  The boyhood home of Gil Blas
-is a sober, almost gloomy town, where the sun is reputed to shine but
-one day in four.  Its inhabitants have much in common with the
-slow-witted Lugense, though they are on the whole more wide-awake and
-self-satisfied.  Of window displays the most frequent was that of a
-volume in richly illustrated paper cover entitled, "Los Envenenadores
-(poisoners) de Chicago."  It was, possibly, an exposé of the packing
-houses, but I did not find time to read it. August was nearing its
-close, and there was still a considerable portion of Spain to be seen.
-Luckily my kilometer-book was scarcely half-used up; but of the joyful
-days of freedom on the open road there could not be many more.
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XIII
-
-                         THE LAND OF THE BASQUE
-
-
-My knapsack garnished, I turned my back on Oviedo early on Sunday
-morning.  The train wound slowly away toward the lofty serrated range
-that shuts off the world on the south.  As we approached the mountains,
-the line began to tie itself in knots, climbing ever upward.  In one
-section two stations seven miles apart had twenty-six miles of railroad
-between them.  At the second of the two a flushed and puffing Spaniard
-burst into our compartment with the information that, having reached the
-former after the train had departed, he had overtaken us on foot.
-
-Still we climbed until, at the turning of the day, high up where clouds
-should have been we surmounted the ridgepole of the range and, racing,
-roaring downward, were almost in a moment back in the barren, rocky,
-sun-baked Spain of old, dust swirling everywhere, the heat wrapping us
-round as with a woolen blanket, drying up the very tobacco in my pouch;
-a change almost as decided as from the forests of Norway to the plains
-of India.
-
-Arrived in León at three, I set off at once tourist-fashion for the
-cathedral, with its soaring Gothic towers and delicate, airy
-flying-buttresses the first truly inspiring bit of Christian
-architecture I had seen in Spain; the first indeed whose exterior was
-anything.  Much of the edifice, however, was glaringly new, the
-scaffolds of the renovators being still in place.
-
-But here again "if the house of God is rich that of man is poor,"
-pauperous in fact.  When once the traveler has forced himself to believe
-that León was not many centuries since the rich capital of a vast empire
-he must surely fall sad and pensive reflecting how mutable and fleeting
-indeed are the things of earth.  The León of to-day is a large village,
-a dried-up, dirty, dilapidated, depopulated, cobble-streeted village of
-snarling, meretricious-minded inhabitants jumbled together inside a wall
-that with the cathedral is the only remaining proof of former
-importance.  Here once more was the beggar with his distressing whine,
-his brow of bronze, and his all too evident injuries; not numerously but
-constituting a large percentage of the population.  In all Spain the
-devise of insurance companies on the fronts of buildings is more than
-frequent; in León there was barely a hovel without one or more.  Which
-could not but awaken profound wonder, for not only are there no wooden
-houses within her walls to make danger of fire imminent, but a greater
-blessing could hardly be imagined for León than a general and
-all-embracing conflagration.
-
-It was, perhaps, because of the unbroken misery with which they were
-surrounded that the Leónese were individually crabbed and cynical.  Not
-a courteous word do I remember having received in all the town, and in
-vitriolic remarks the keepers and guests of the tumble-down parador
-where I was forced to put up outdid all others.
-
-I was off in the morning at the first opportunity, again by train,
-which, passing in the early afternoon through a blinding sand-storm near
-the village of Cisneros, landed me soon after at Palencia.  This was a
-counterpart of León; a trifle less sulky and universally miserable, but
-as sprawling, sun-parched, and slovenly.  Its surrounding plains were
-utterly verdureless, their flanking hills ossified, its gardens,
-promenades, and Alameda past all hope of relief by sprinkling even had
-its river not long since gone desert-dry as the rest.  I left the place
-quickly, riding into the night and descending at length to march to the
-inspiriting music of a military band along a broad, thick-peopled
-Alameda, at the end of which a giant statue of Columbus bulked massive
-against the moonlit sky, into Valladolid.
-
-I had come again upon a real city, almost the first since leaving
-Madrid; whence accommodations, while in no sense lacking, were high in
-price.  In the course of an hour of prowling, however, I was apprised of
-the existence of a modest casa eta huéspedes in a canyon-like side
-street.  I rang the great doorbell below several times in vain; which
-was as I had expected, for foolish indeed would have been the Spaniard
-who remained within doors on such a night, while the band played and the
-city strolled in the Alameda.  I dropped my bundle at my feet and leaned
-against the lintel of the massive doorway.
-
-Within an hour there arrived another seeker after quarters, a slender
-Spaniard in the early summer of life, who carried two heavy portmanteaus
-and a leather swordcase.  Almost at the opening of our conversation he
-surprised me by inquiring, "You are a foreigner, verdad, señor?"  I
-commended his penetration and, as we chatted, sought for some sign of
-his profession or place in society.  All at once the long, slender
-swordcase caught my eye.
-
-"Ah!  Es usted torero, señor," I observed with assurance.
-
-The youth awakened the echoes of the narrow street with his laughter.
-
-"Bullfighter!  No, indeed!  I am happy to say no.  I am a student in the
-national cavalry school here, just returned from my month's furlough.
-But your error is natural," he went on, "and my fault.  I have really no
-right to appear in civilian garb.  It would mean a month of bread and
-water at least if one of our officers caught a glimpse of me.  But
-carajo!  The family above may not be back by midnight.  We can leave our
-baggage with the portier next door."
-
-We strolled slowly back to the brilliantly lighted Plaza de la
-Constitutión.  Suddenly the youth interrupted an anecdote of the
-tan-bark to exclaim in a calm but earnest voice:
-
-"Caramba!  There come my commandante and the first lieutenant."
-
-Two men of forty-five or fifty, in resplendent uniforms and tall red
-caps, their swords clinking along the pavement, were sauntering down
-upon us.  I stepped quickly to the opposite side of my companion, being
-taller--and likewise curious.
-
-"Hombre!" he protested sharply, stepping back again.  "No tenga V.
-cuidado.  It is not our way to hide from our officers."
-
-With head erect and military stride he marched straight on before him.
-Luckily the officers were so engrossed in conversation that neither
-glanced up as they passed.
-
-We drifted into a café and ordered "helado," that Spanish imitation of
-ice-cream the calling of which in the streets had so frequently caused
-me to whirl about in astonishment, so much does it sound like our
-"hello."  Over it we fell to discussing things American, in which we
-were gradually joined by several well-dressed men at the adjoining
-marble tables.  In the course of the evening I chanced to remark that
-one of the surprises of my summer's trip had been to find so little
-resentment against the United States.
-
-"Señor," said the youth, while each and all of our companions gave signs
-of agreement, "nothing more fortunate has befallen our country in a
-century than the loss of Cuba and the Philippines.  Not only has it
-taken a load off the Spanish people; it has brought more relief than you
-can guess to us of the army.  The colonies were the dumping-ground of
-our profession.  Once let an officer show ability and he was forthwith
-shipped off to the islands to die.  Now they are taken away, Spain has
-already begun to regain her lost place among the nations. No, señor; we
-of the army at least think nothing but kindness to your people for the
-relief."
-
-Returned to the casa de huéspedes, the student and I were given
-adjoining rooms and saw much of Valladolid together before I took train
-the second morning after to Burgos.  There, were regulation "sights" in
-abundance; on every hand memories of the Cid Campeador, even the spot
-where stood his dwelling--all as authentic as the popular landmarks of
-Jerusalem.  Two miles or more out along the shallow mill-race that
-Burgos calls a river I visited the nunnery of Las Huelgas, which claims
-for its distinction never in its centuries of existence to have admitted
-to the veil less than a daughter of the nobility.  The stroll is
-pleasant, but the place, noble though it be, unexciting--at least
-outwardly.  Of the cathedral, the finest in Spain, much might be
-said--that has been often said before.
-
-It was in Burgos that I saw for the first time what I might have seen
-earlier and frequently had my tastes run that way,--a Spanish cemetery.
-More exactly it was a corpse-file, a perpendicular hillside in which
-hundreds of bodies had been pigeon-holed for future reference, with the
-name and a charitably indulgent characterization of the deceased on the
-end of his coffin.  The Spaniard, with his superstitions, prefers this
-style of tomb for much the same reason, it seems, that the Arab seals
-his graves with cement,--that the emissaries from the less popular
-regions may not bear away the departed before the agents of the better
-and hence slower realm put in an appearance.
-
-The greatest experience of my day in Burgos was the view from the summit
-of the hot, dry Cerro de San Miguel.  Not merely does it offer a mighty
-and comprehensive vista of half the stony-bare face of Castilla Vieja,
-but a bird's-eye view as it were of all Spain and her history.  Of the
-city spread out at one's feet fully three-fourths the space is taken up
-by cathedral, churches, convents, monasteries, casas de misericordia,
-the vast bulk of the castle, the barracks, the bullring,--all the
-countless buildings of non-producers; while between them in the nooks
-and corners wherever a crack offers are packed and huddled the hovels of
-the mere inhabitants.  There, in plain sight, is Spain's malady.  She is
-a land of non-producers.  Ecclesiastics, soldiers, useless octroi
-guards, beggars rotten with the notion fostered by the omnivorous
-priesthood that mendicancy is an honorable profession, make up almost
-the bulk of her population of productive age.  Not without reason does
-nomadic Borrow lift up his clench-fisted wail against "Batuschca."
-
-There is one road to redemption for Spain,--that she shoot her priests
-and set her soldiers to work. As isolated individuals the merry,
-dissolute fellows of the cloth might be permitted to live on as they
-have, and suffer the natural end of such living. But as a class they are
-beyond reform; their point of view is so utterly warped and
-incorrigible, they have grown so pestiferous with laziness and "graft"
-that there is no other remedy, "no hay otro remedio" as the Spaniard
-himself would say could his throttled mind cast off the rubbish of
-superstition and cant for one clear thought.  Let him who protests that
-they are teachers of the youth go once and see what they teach,--the
-vapid, senseless lies about "saints" so far from truth as to be an
-abomination, so far above the possible aspirations and attainments of
-real humanity as to force the rising generations from very hopelessness
-of imitation to lose heart and sink to iniquity as the priesthood has
-done before them.  Or are there some who still credit them with feeding
-the poor?  A high praise, indeed, exactly equal to that due the footpad
-who refunds his victim carfare that he may be the more quickly rid of
-him.
-
-Therein lies the chief weakness of Spain.  It is not because she is
-ruled by a slender youth chosen by the accident of birth rather than by
-a more portly man chosen more or less by his fellow-citizens; not
-because her religion happens to be that of Rome rather than the
-austerities of Calvin or the fatalism of Mohammed; not because her
-national sport is a bit more dramatically brutal than that of other
-lands; not because her soil is dry and stony and her rains and rivers
-slight; not because her people are decadent, her human stock run down--I
-have plowed in the sea in the foregoing pages if I have not made it
-clear that her real manhood, the workman, the peasant, the arriero, the
-muscle and sinew of the nation, are as hardy, toilsome and all-enduring
-as the world harbors.  But in the long centuries of warfare her
-attention was drawn away from internal affairs, she fell among thieves
-within, and the force of example, the helplessness of the individual
-drove her people in the line of least resistance,--to become thieves
-too, nationally, officially, until mad
-grab-what-you-can-and-the-devil-grab-the-ungrabbing has her by the
-throat gasping for life.  If she is not to sink down for the vultures of
-the nations to pick clean of her meager scraps of flesh there must arise
-within her boundaries a man, a movement, a sweeping change that shall
-cast off the burden of precedent and turn her officials to doing
-honestly with all their might what now they do with all their might
-dishonestly. She must regain confidence in the necessity and prevalence
-of honesty.  She must learn that patent yet rarely comprehended truth
-that work and work only is the real source of life; she must cease to be
-the sworn enemy of the innovator, thinking her ways best and those of
-the rest of the world abnormal, unable to see a yard beyond her national
-boundaries, scorning all ideas and arguments from the outside like the
-most hide-bound of Orientals.
-
-The next afternoon found me in Vitoria, in the land of the Basque; yet
-another kind of Spain. Vitoria is a city of to-day, clean, bustling,
-almost American in her streets and architecture and the wide-awake air
-of the _Vascongado_.  The _boína_--round cap without visor and the end
-of a string for tassel--had all at once become universal, worn, like the
-fez in Damascus, by every age and grade of man from bootblack to mayor.
-So pleasing was this prosaic city that even though her prices were high
-I loitered in her shade until the next afternoon before seeking out the
-highway to Bilbáo.
-
-There lay sixty-seven kilometers to the seaport, a half of which I hoped
-to cover before halting for the night.  For on the following day Bilbáo
-was to celebrate in honor of the king.  The way led me through a country
-fertile for all its stoniness, made so by the energy and diligence of
-the Basque, whose strong features, bold curved nose, piercing eyes and
-sturdy form was to be seen on every hand.  With the southern Spaniard
-this new race had almost nothing in common, and though as serious of
-deportment as the gallego there was neither his bashfulness nor
-stupidity.  The Castilian spoken in the region was excellent, the
-farming implements of modern manufacture and the methods of the
-husbandman thousands of years ahead of Andalusia.
-
-As the day was fading I began to clamber my way upward into the
-mountains that rose high in the darkening sky ahead.  The night grew to
-one of the blackest, the heavens being overcast; but he who marches on
-into the darkness without contact with artificial light may still see
-almost plainly.  It was two hours, perhaps, after nightfall, and the
-road was winding ever higher around the shoulder of a mammoth peak, its
-edge a sheer precipice above unfathomable depths, when suddenly I saw a
-man, a denser blackness against the sea of obscurity, standing
-stock-still on the utmost edge of the highway.
-
-"Buenos tardes," I greeted in a low voice, almost afraid that a hearty
-tone would send him toppling backward to his death.
-
-He neither answered nor moved.  I stepped closer.
-
-"You have rather a dangerous position, verdad, señor?"
-
-Still he stared motionless at me through the darkness.  Could he be some
-sleep-walker?  I moved quietly forward and, thrusting out a hand,
-touched him on the sleeve.  It was hard as if frozen!  For an instant I
-recoiled, then with a sudden instinctive movement passed a hand quickly
-and lightly over his face.  Was I dreaming?  That, too, was hard and
-cold.  I sprang back and, rummaging hastily through my pockets, found
-one broken match.  The wind was rushing up from the bottomless gulf
-below. I struck a light, holding it in the hollow of my hand, and in the
-instant before it was blown out I caught a few words of an inscription
-on a pedestal:
-
-                         "ERECTED TO THE MEM--
-                      THROWN OVER THIS PRECIPICE--
-                          BANDITS--NIGHT OF--"
-
-and before I had made out date or name I was again in darkness.
-
-Over the summit, on a lower, less wind-swept level, I came upon a long
-mining town scattered on either side of the highway.  I dropped in at a
-wineshop and bespoke supper and lodging.  A dish of the now omnipresent
-bacalao was set before me, but for a time the keeper showed strong
-disinclination to house a wandering stranger falling upon him at this
-advanced hour.
-
-The young woman who served me at table and answered the demands for wine
-of the half-dozen youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place
-in such surroundings.  Nothing was plainer than that she was not of the
-barmaid type.  One would have said rather the convent-reared daughter of
-some well-to-do merchant or large farmer.  This surmise turned out to be
-close to the truth.  When the carousing miners had drifted into the
-night and I, by dint of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found
-my way into the good graces of the family, I heard the girl's story--for
-rightly approached the Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private
-affairs. Her father had been the principal shop-keeper of the mining
-town, and had died a few weeks before.  His debts were heavy and when
-all claims had been settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five
-hundred pesetas.
-
-"But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas!  It is a fortune, señorita, in
-Spain.  You could have started a shop, or lived well until the novio
-appeared."
-
-"Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with wondering eyes.  "Do
-you forget purgatory?  For the repose of my father's soul five hundred
-masses must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and each mass
-costs a peseta.  Then I have come to work here."
-
-There was that in the air next morning that reminded me, as I wound down
-into a wooded, well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its
-close.  The day grew quickly warm, however.  In the knowledge that the
-king was sojourning in the city upon which I was marching, I was fully
-prepared to endure long catechizing and examination by guardias civiles.
-My wonder was not slight, therefore, when I was suffered to pass through
-one, two, three villages without being once challenged.
-
-But the expected meeting came at last and quite made up for the lack of
-others.  The third village lay already behind me when I heard an
-authoritative shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man of thirty,
-dressed half in peasant, half in village garb, beckoning to me with a
-commanding gesture to return.  Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I
-swung on my heel and set off again.  He shouted loudly, and racing after
-me, caught me by an arm. I shook him off with an indignation that sent
-him spinning half across the highway.  Instead of retreating he sprang
-at me again and we should certainly have been soon entangled in a crude
-performance of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice quaking
-with anger:
-
-"Have a care, señor, in resisting the law.  I am a miñón."
-
-"Miñón!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the Basque provinces the
-national guardias are reënforced by local officers thus named.  "Then
-why the devil don't you wear your uniform?  How shall I know you are not
-a footpad?"
-
-"I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still visibly shaking with
-the rage of a Spaniard whose "pundonor" has been sullied.
-
-I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento, in the doorway of which
-he halted, and, examining me for concealed weapons, demanded that I
-untie my knapsack.  Never before had this been more than superficially
-inspected, but the thoroughness with which the angry miñón overhauled
-it, examining even my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and
-over as if convinced that it could be opened by some secret spring,
-fully made up for any possible carelessness of his fellow-officers
-elsewhere.  When he had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he
-handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me with a scowl the
-conventional "Go with God;" to which I answered, "Queda V. con el
-mismisimo diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his bullet-headed
-intellect.
-
-Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests turned to a cindered soil
-and the sooty aspect of a factory town.  I mounted a last hill and
-descended quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into Bilbáo.  Here
-was the first entirely modern city I had seen in Spain; one might easily
-have fancied one's self in Newcastle or Seattle.  The Spanish casa de
-huéspedes seemed not even known by name, and in its place were only
-boisterous taverns, smacking of sea-faring custom and overrun with the
-touts that feed on the simple mariner.
-
-As I sat toward evening in one of these establishments, there entered a
-man something over thirty-five, dressed in boína and workingman's garb
-that showed but slight wear.  I noted him only half consciously, being
-at that moment expressing to the landlord my surprise that the king,
-instead of being in Bilbáo as he was reported by the newspapers, was ten
-or twelve miles away on his yacht at the mouth of the river. The keeper,
-a stocky Basque of much better parts than the average of his guild,
-glanced up from his spigots and replied in a smooth and pleasant voice:
-
-"Porque, señor, no quiere morir tan joven--Because he does not care to
-die so young."
-
-"Y con mujer tan bella y fresca--And with a wife so beautiful and
-fresh," added a thick-set fellow at a neighboring table without looking
-up from his cards.
-
-Love for Alfonso is not one of the characteristics of the masses in this
-section of the country.
-
-Meanwhile the newcomer, whose eye had been wandering leisurely over the
-assembly, threaded his way half across the room to sit down at my table.
-I wondered a bit at the preference, but certain he was no tout, gave him
-the customary greeting.  By the time I had accepted a glass and treated
-in turn we were exchanging personal information.  He announced himself a
-cobbler, and even before I had broached the subject suggested that he
-could find me a lodging with an old woman above his shop.  This
-workroom, when we reached it, proved to be nothing but a kit of tools
-and a few strips of leather scattered about the small hallway at the
-foot of the stairs. I found above the hospitality he had promised,
-however, and paying two night's lodging in an unusually pleasant room,
-descended.
-
-The shoemaker appeared more obliging than industrious, for he at once
-laid aside the shoe he was hammering and announced that he was going to
-give himself the pleasure of spending the evening with me and of finding
-me the best place to take in the fireworks that were to be set off in
-honor of the king. I explained that it was rather my plan to attend the
-city theater, where I might both see that remarkable personage in the
-flesh and hear one of Molière's best comedies in Spanish.
-
-"There is more than time for both," replied the cobbler, and forthwith
-fell to extolling the coming spectacle so highly that he came near to
-arousing within me, too, an interest in the fireworks.
-
-At the end of an hour's stroll we found ourselves on the summit of a
-knoll in the outskirts, in a compact sea of Bilbaoans watching a tame
-imitation of a Fourth of July celebration on the slope of one of the
-surrounding hills.  The display was, as I have said, in honor of the
-king; though it turned out that his indifferent majesty was at that
-moment dining and wining a company of fellow-sportsmen on board the
-_Giralda_ twelve miles away.
-
-The cobbler set a more than leisurely pace back to the city, but we
-regained at length the bank of the river and, crossing the wooded Paseo
-Arenal, approached the theater.  Before it, was packed a vast and
-compact multitude through which I struggled my way to the entrance, only
-to be informed in the customary box-office tones that there was not
-another ticket to be had.  The shoemaker was no theater-goer, and as my
-own disappointment was not overwhelming, we set out to fight our way
-back to the Paséo.
-
-Long before we had succeeded in that venturesome undertaking, however,
-there burst forth a sudden, unheralded roar of uncounted voices, the
-immense throng surged riverward with an abruptness that all but swept us
-off our feet, the thunder of thousands of hoofs swelled nearer, and down
-upon us rode an entire regiment of guardias civiles in uniforms so new
-they seemed but that moment to have left the tailor, and astride finer
-horses than I had dreamed existed in Spain.  Straight into the crowd
-they dashed, headlong, at full canter, like cowboys into a drove of
-steers, sweeping all before them, scattering luckless individuals in all
-directions, and completely surrounding the theater in solid phalanx.
-Before I had recovered breath there arose another mighty shout, and,
-some three hundred more horsemen, with a richly caparisoned carriage in
-their midst, dashed through the throng from a landing-stage on the river
-bank behind us to the door of the theater. I caught a fleeting glimpse
-of a slight figure in a rakish overcoat, a burst of music sounded from
-the theater, and died as suddenly away as the doors closed behind the
-royal arrival.  Again the cavalry charged, driving men, women and
-children pellmell back a hundred yards from the building and, forming a
-yet wider circle around it, settled down to sit their horses like
-statues until the play should be ended.
-
-When my wonder had somewhat subsided there came upon me an all but
-uncontrollable desire to shout with laughter.  The ludicrousness, the
-ridiculousness of it all!  A vast concourse of humanity driven
-helter-skelter like as many cattle, scores of persons jostled and
-bruised, thirteen hundred of the most able-bodied men in Spain to sit
-motionless on horseback around a theater late into the night, all for
-the mere protection of one slight youth whose equal was easily to be
-found in every town or village of the land!  Truly this institution of
-kingship is as humorous a hoax as has been played upon mankind since man
-was.
-
-A hoax on all concerned.  For the incumbent himself, the slender youth
-inside, who must spend his brief span of years amid such mummery,
-commands of himself a bit of mild admiration.  I fell to wondering what
-he would give for the right to wander freely and unnoticed all a
-summer's day along the open highway.  Let him who can imagine himself
-born a king, discovering as early as such notions can penetrate to his
-infant intellect that his fellow-mortals have placed him high on a
-pedestal, have given him even without the asking power, riches, and
-almost reverence as a superior being, when at heart he knows full well
-he is of quite the same clay as they; and he may well ask himself
-whether he would have grown up even as manly as the youth who goes by
-the name of Alfonso XIII.  Recalling that former kings of Spain could
-not be touched by other than a royal finger, we may surely grant common
-sense to this sovereign who dances uncondescendingly with daughters of
-the middle class, who chats freely with bullfighters, peasants, or
-apple-women.  Pleasing, too, is his devil-may-carelessness.  On this
-same night, for instance, after reboarding his yacht, he took it
-suddenly into his mad young head to return at once through this, his
-most hostile province, to his queen.  At one in the morning he was rowed
-ashore with one companion, stepped into his automobile, himself playing
-chauffeur, and tore away through Bilbáo and a hundred miles along the
-craggy coast to San Sebastian.  It is not hard to guess what might have
-happened had he punctured a tire among those stony mountains and been
-chanced upon by a homing band of peasants brave with wine.
-
-Musing all which I turned to address the cobbler and found him gone.
-The crowd was slowly melting away.  I sat down in the Paseo and waited
-an hour, but my erstwhile companion did not reappear. When I descended
-from my lodging next morning there remained not a trace of his "shop" at
-the foot of the stairs.  Had the village miñón done me the honor of
-telegraphing my description to the seaport, or was my road-worn garb the
-livery of suspicion? This only I know; when, that Sunday evening after
-my return from a glimpse of the open sea, I asked my hostess whether her
-fellow renter were really a shoemaker, she screwed up her parchment-like
-features into a smile and answered:
-
-"Sí, señor, one of the shoemakers of his majesty."
-
-
-
-
-                              CHAPTER XIV
-
-                         A DESCENT INTO ARAGON
-
-
-There was an unwonted excitement in the air when I boarded the train
-next morning for the longest unbroken ride of my Spanish journey.
-Pernales, the anachronism, the twentieth-century bandit of the environs
-of Córdoba, had fallen.  Aboard the train newspapers were as numerous as
-on the New York "Elevated" at a similar hour.  I bought one and was soon
-lost like the rest in the adventures of this last defier of the mighty
-guardia civil.
-
-The story was simple.  Two evenings before, about the time I had been
-yawning over the king's fireworks, Pernales had met a village arriero
-among the foothills of his retreat, and asked him some question about
-the road.  The rustic gave him the desired information, but guessing
-with whom he was speaking, had raced away, once he was out of sight, as
-fast as he could drive his ass before him, to carry his suspicions to
-the village alcalde.  The rest was commonplace.  A dozen guardias
-stalked the unsuspecting bandolero among the hills, and coming upon him
-toward sunrise, brought his unsanctioned career abruptly to a close.
-
-[Illustration: The Roman walls of Leon]
-
-"Our special correspondent" had dismally failed to cast over his account
-the glamour of romance, but in compensation had taken a reporter's care
-to give the precise point in the right temple where the ball had
-entered, with the exact dimensions of the orifice, as well as the life
-story of the hero who had bored it.  Nay, with almost American haste and
-resourcefulness the paper printed a full-length portrait of the
-successful hunter--or one at least of a man who could not have been
-vastly different in appearance, in a uniform that was certainly very
-similar.  Alas! The good old days of the bandit and the contrabandista
-are forever gone in Spain; the humdrum era of the civil guard is come.
-Pernales' is but another story of a man born a century too late.
-
-[Illustration: The land of the boina.  Alfonso XII at a picnic]
-
-All day long as we toiled and twisted over the Cantabrian range and
-descended southward, this only was the topic of conversation of all
-grades and sexes of travelers.  An hour's halt at Miranda and we creaked
-on along the bank of Spain's greatest river, the Ebro, talking still of
-bandoleros and the regret of their passing.  Slowly the green tinge in
-the landscape faded away and in its place came reddish cliffs and a
-sun-seared and all but desert country spreading away from either bank of
-the red-dyed river, sterile rolling plains relieved only by small oases
-of fertility and isolated and in all probability bigoted villages
-standing colorless on colorless hillsides.  As central Spain may be
-likened to rocky Judea, so this resembles in some degree Egypt, with the
-Ebro as the Nile.
-
-It was late in the evening when I arrived in Saragossa and, crossing the
-broad river by the Puente de Piedra, found myself in one of the most
-labyrinthian cities of Spain.  But so practiced had I grown in such
-quest that in less than an hour I had engaged accommodation at my own
-price, which by this time had descended to two and a half pesetas.
-
-The "sight" par excellence of Saragossa is of course her "Virgen del
-Pilar."  The story runs that Santiago, who is none other than Saint
-James, while wandering about Spain, as he was wont to ramble in various
-corners of the earth, was favored one evening by a call from the Mother
-of Christ, who, during all their little chat, stood on the top of a
-stone pillar. That the tale is true there seems little chance for doubt,
-for they have the pillar yet; and it is over this that has been erected
-the vast cathedral to which flock thousands of pilgrims during every
-month of the year.
-
-I repaired to it early, but was soon turned melancholy with the
-recollection of Puck's profound saying anent the folly of mankind.  The
-interior of the edifice is as impressive as that of an empty warehouse.
-Under the main dome is a large chapel screaming with riches, in the back
-of which, on her pillar, stands the Virgin--turned to black,
-half-decayed wood--dressed in more thousands of dollars' worth of gold
-and silver, of resplendent robes and vociferous gaudiness than god
-Juggernaut of India ever possessed at the height of his influence.
-Before it worshipers are always kneeling.  In the back wall of the
-chapel is an opening through which one can touch the pillar--and find a
-cup-shaped hole worn in it by such action during the centuries.  I sat
-down on a bench near the far-famed orifice, and for close upon an hour
-watched the unbroken procession file past.  Beggar women, rag-pickers,
-ladies of wealth, cankerous old men, merchants, city sports,
-lawyers--Saragossa is the one city of Spain where even men go to
-church--every grade and variety of Aragonese pressed close upon the
-heels one of another, each bowing down as he passed to kiss the hole
-deeper into the pillar.  At bottom the difference is slight indeed
-between the religion of the Spaniard and that of the Hindu.
-
-In the city swarms a hungry, ragged people, more often than not without
-shoes, yet one and all with the proverbial haughty pride and somber mood
-of Aragon in face and bearing, stiff-shouldered, bristling with a
-touch-me-not-with-a-pole expression. Here, too, may still be found,
-especially among the peasants from the further districts, the old
-provincial costume,--knee breeches, a jacket reaching barely to the
-waist, and a red cloth wound about the head.
-
-Tiring of such things, there is a pleasant promenade along the banks of
-the Ebro, whence one will drift naturally through the Portillo gate
-where the "flying Gaul was foil'd by a woman's hand."  It is startling
-to find the settings of two such world-famed dramas so close together,
-but from the gate one has only to saunter a few yards along the Madrid
-highway to come upon the weather-battered Aljafería of "Trovatore" fame.
-To-day it is a barracks. Within its towers, through now unbarred
-windows, may be seen soldiers polishing their spurs and muskets, humming
-now and then a snatch of popular song; but one may wait in vain to hear
-some tuneful prisoner strike up the expected "miserere."
-
-There is one stroll in Saragossa that I would commend to the wanderer
-who finds pleasure in gaining elevations whence he may look down, as it
-were, on the world.  It is out along the Canal Imperial, past the
-swollen-paunched statue of its sponsor Pignatelli, and across the
-Huerva; then winding lazily southwest and upward the stroller comes
-suddenly out on the crown of a bald hillock.  There, below him in its
-flat valley, spreads all Saragossa, far enough away to lose the
-crassness of detail, yet distinct, the two finished towers of the Pilar
-rising above it like minarets, the whole girded by the green huerta, and
-beyond and all around the desert in gashed and gnarled hills like the
-Libyan range of another continent. Here I lounged until the setting sun,
-peering over my shoulder, cast the radiant flush of evening on the city
-below, which gradually fading away was at length effaced in the night,
-its sounds mingling together in a sort of music that drifted up to me
-long after the scene itself had wholly disappeared.
-
-I descended for supper.  It is the lot of man that he has no sooner
-climbed to a height where he may look down calmly on the scramble of
-life than he must again plunge down into it to _eat_--or to earn more
-bread.  To-morrow I must set my face toward the frontier, toward New
-York and a return to labor.
-
-On my way to the five-o'clock train next morning I passed through
-Saragossa's vast covered market and halted to lay in a last supply of
-figs.  The cheery old woman who sold them grasped my fifteen céntimos
-tightly in her hand and solemnly made with it the sign of the cross.  I
-expressed surprise, and a misgiving lest I had unwittingly parted with
-coppers possessing peculiar virtues.
-
-"Cómo, señor!" she cried, in wonder at my ignorance. "It is the first
-money of the day.  If I do not say a paternoster with it I may sit here
-until nightfall without selling another perrito-worth, you may be sure."
-
-The train labored back along the Ebro to Castejon, where I changed cars
-and journeyed northward, every click of the wheels seeming to cry out
-that my Spanish summer was nearing its end.  At high noon I descended in
-a dusty plain before the sheer face of the rock on which stands Pamplona
-of Navarre. When I had climbed into the city I inquired of the first
-policeman for a modest casa de huéspedes.  He rubbed his head a moment
-and set off with me along the street, chatting sociably as we went.
-Soon we came upon another officer, to whom the first repeated my
-question.  He scratched his head a moment and fell in beside us,
-babbling cheerily.  Fully a half-mile beyond we accosted a third
-officer.  He rasped his close-shaven poll yet another moment and joined
-us in the quest, adding a new stock of anecdotes.  Here was courtesy
-extraordinary, even for Spain.  Had the police force of Pamplona
-discovered in me some prince incognito, or was mine to be the rôle of
-the rolling pancake?  We rambled on, but without success, for not
-another officer could we find in all our circuit of the city.  It was
-certainly close upon an hour after my original inquiry, and something
-like a hundred yards from the same spot, that we entered a side street
-and mounted, still in quartet, to a cheap but homelike boarding-house
-high up in an aged building.  The courtesy was quickly explained.  The
-landlady, having expressed her deep gratitude for being brought a new
-guest, begged each of the officers to do her the favor of accepting a
-glass of wine. They smacked their lips over it, exchanged with the
-household the customary salutations and banter, and sauntered back to
-their beats.
-
-When I had eaten, I descended for a turn about the city with the uncle
-of my grateful hostess, a mountain-hardened Basque of sixty, in the
-universal boína, who had but recently retired from a lifetime of rocky
-hillside farming.  Of both his province of Navarre and of himself he
-talked freely until suddenly my tongue stumbled upon some question of
-military conscription.  He fell at once silent, his jaws stiffened, and
-into his face came the reflection of a bitter sadness.  For the Basques
-are by no means reconciled to the loss of their cherished _fueros_, or
-special political privileges.  In silence the sturdy old man led the way
-half across the city to one of her gates and, climbing a knoll that gave
-a good view of the surrounding fortifications, said in cheerless tones:
-
-"Don Henrico, we have here the strongest city walls in Spain.  But what
-use are they now against the king's modern artillery?  No hay remedio.
-We must serve in his armies."
-
-As we threaded our way slowly back to the boarding-house I halted at a
-money changer's to buy a twenty-franc piece.  The transaction left me
-only a handful of coppers in Spanish currency, and I went early to bed
-lest there be not enough remaining to carry me out of the country.
-
-On a glorious clear September morning I turned my back on Spain and set
-forth from Pamplona to tramp over the Pyrenees by the pass of
-Roncesvalles, being just uncertain enough of the road to lend zest to
-the undertaking.  At the edge of the plain to the northward of the city
-a highway began to wind its way upward along the bank of a young river,
-not laboriously, but steadily rising.  Habitations were rare.  Late in
-the morning a spot above whirling rapids in shaded solitude suggested a
-plunge; but as I pulled off my coat a sound fell on my ear and, looking
-across the stream, I saw a half-dozen women kneeling on the bank and
-staring curiously across at me. When I retreated, they laughed heartily
-and fell once more to pounding away at their laundry-work on the stones.
-
-Some distance higher I found another pool in which, by rolling over and
-over, I won the afterglow of a real swim.  Sharper ascents succeeded,
-though still none steep.  I was soon surrounded by a Tyrolian scenery of
-forest and deep-cut valleys, and among up-to-date people--the farming
-implements being of modern type and the smallest villages having
-electric lights run by power from the mountain streams. Every
-fellow-mortal, young or old, as is usual in mountain regions, gave me
-greeting, not with the familiar "Vaya!" nor the "Buenos!" of Galicia,
-but with "Adiós!" which seemed here to mean much more than the
-grammatical "Good-by."  In the place of guardias civiles were
-carabineros in a provincial uniform, whose advances, if less warm and
-companionable, were none the less kindly.
-
-Toward evening the road flowed up into a broad, oblong meadow,
-ankle-deep in greenest grass, musical with the sound of cow-bells,
-across which it drifted as if content to rest for a time on its oars
-before taking the final climb.  The sun was setting when I reached
-Burguete at forty-four kilometers, station of the trans-Pyrenean
-diligence and the point that I had been assured I should do well to
-reach in a two-day's walk.  But I felt as unwearied as at the outset;
-the towers of Roncesvalles stood plainly visible five kilometers ahead
-across the green tableland.  I rambled on in the cool of evening and by
-dark was housed in a good inn of the mountain village.
-
-When the supper hour arrived, the landlord stepped across to me to ask
-whether I would eat as a guest or as a member of the family.  I inquired
-what the distinction might be.
-
-"No difference," he answered, "except that as a member of the family you
-pay a peseta upon leaving, and as a guest you pay two."
-
-It was of course en famille that I supped, and right royally, at a board
-merry with good-humored peasants and arrieros rather than in the silent,
-gloomy company of a half-dozen convention-ridden travelers in an
-adjoining room.
-
-Roncesvalles would have been an unequaled spot in which to pass an
-autumn week, roaming in the forest glens of the mountains, dreaming of
-the heroic days of Roland.  But the hour of reckoning and of New York
-was near at hand.  Of all sensations I most abhor the feeling that I
-must be in a given place at a given time.
-
-A short climb through wooded hillsides strewn with gigantic rocks and I
-found myself all at once and unexpectedly on the very summit of the
-Pyrenees.  In no sense had the ascent been toilsome, vastly less so than
-several scrambles of two or three hours' duration between Lugo and
-Oviedo.  From the French side, no doubt, it would have been far more of
-a task. Gazing northward I recognized for the first time that I stood
-high indeed above the common level of the earth.  Miles below, blue as
-the sea, lay France, the forested mountains at my feet rolling
-themselves out into hills, the hills growing lower and lower and
-spreading away into the far, far distance like another world.  The
-modern world--and I was all at once assailed with a desire to ask what
-it had been doing in all the days I had been gone.  Then the highway
-seized me in its grasp and hurried me away down, racing, rushing, almost
-stumbling, so fast I was forced to break away from it and clamber down
-at my own pace through dense unpeopled forests, to fall upon it again
-far below and stalk with it at lunch-time into the village of Val
-Carlos.  Yet another hour's descent and I crossed a small stream into
-the little hamlet of Arneguy; the long-forgotten figure of a French
-gendarme slouched forth from a hut to shout as I passed, "Anything
-dutiable, monsieur?" and my Spanish journey was among the things that
-have been.
-
-
-
-
-                               CHAPTER XV
-
-                          EMIGRATING HOMEWARD
-
-
-In reality almost as much as in fancy I had entered another world.  It
-is chiefly in retrospect that a journey through Spain, as through
-Palestine, brings home to the traveler the full difference between those
-gaunt regions of the earth and the world to which he is accustomed.
-Here the change was like that from a squatter's cabin, a bachelor's
-quarters to a residence of opulence.
-
-Arrived while the day was still in its prime at St. Jean Pied de Port, I
-found myself undecided how to continue.  The rescuing forty dollars
-awaited me--postal errors precluded--in Bordeaux; but Baedeker having
-now become mere lumber, I had no means of knowing which of two routes to
-follow to that city. I halted to make inquiries of an old Spaniard
-drowsing before his shop--so like one of mine own people he seemed amid
-this babble of French.  But though he received me with Castilian
-courtesy he could give me no real information.  Under the awning of a
-café a hundred paces beyond, two well-dressed men were sipping cooling
-drinks.  Their touring-car stood before the building, and not far away,
-in the shade of an overhanging shoulder of the Pyrenees, loitered a
-chauffeur, in all the accustomed accoutrements of that genus.  He had
-the appearance of an obliging fellow.  I strolled across to him, hastily
-summoning up my dormant French.
-
-"Monsieur," I began, "vous me pardonnerez, mais pour aller d'ici à
-Bordeaux vaut il mieux passer par Bayonne ou bien par Mont de--"
-
-He was grinning at me sheepishly and shifting from one leg to the other.
-As I paused he blurted out:
-
-"Aw, I don't talk no French!"
-
-"Then I suppose it 'll have to be English," I answered, in the first
-words of that language I had spoken in ninety-six days--and in truth
-they came with difficulty.
-
-"Go' bly' me!" burst out the astounded knight of the steering-wheel.
-"'Ow ever 'd you get in this corner o' the world?  Say, I ayn't said
-more 'n 'yes, sir' or 'no, sir' to their lordships--" with a slight jerk
-of the head toward the men under the awning--"in so long I 've bally
-near forgot 'ow.  'Ere it is Sunday an'--"
-
-"Saturday," I interrupted.
-
-"Sunday, I say," repeated the chauffeur, drawing out a card on which
-were penciled many crude crosses.  "Ere 's 'ow I keep track--"
-
-"Señora," I asked, turning to a woman who was filling a pitcher at a
-hydrant behind me, "qué día tenemos hoy?"
-
-Her lip curled disdainfully as she answered:
-
-"Tiens!  Vous me croyez un de ces barbares-là?"--tossing her head toward
-the mountain range  behind us.
-
-"Mille pardons," I laughed.  "Force of habit. This monsieur and I are
-disputing whether to-day is Saturday or Sunday."
-
-"Out again without your nurses!" she cried sarcastically.  "Saturday, of
-course."
-
-"Now 'ear that!" said the chauffeur, almost tearfully, when I
-interpreted.  "'Ow ever can a man keep track of anything in this bally
-country?  Say, what was that question you was tryin' to ask me?"
-
-"I 'm walking from Gib to Bordeaux," I remarked casually, and repeated
-my former inquiry.  His expression changed slowly from incredulity to
-commiseration.  Suddenly he thrust a hand into his pocket.
-
-"I say, won't you 'ave a mite of a lift?  Why, we took near all
-yesterday to come from that place. You couldn't walk there in a month."
-
-"No, thanks, I 'm fairly well heeled," I answered.
-
-"Better 'ave a yellow-boy," he persisted, drawing out several English
-sovereigns.  "Lord, you 're more 'n welcome, y' know.  They ayn't no
-bloomin' use to me 'ere!"
-
-At that moment I noted that the milords under the awning had spread out
-before them a large touring map, and I left the chauffeur gasping at my
-audacity as I stepped across to them.  The older was struggling to give
-an order to the waiter, who crouched towel on arm over them.  There is a
-strange similarity between a full-grown Briton attempting to speak
-French and a strong man playing with a doll.
-
-"Beg pawdon, gentlemen," I said, when I had helped them out of the
-difficulty, "but would you mind my glancing at your map?  I want to
-find--"
-
-"Ah--why, certainly," gasped one of the startled nobles.
-
-But even with the chart before me I was no nearer a decision, for the
-two roads appeared of almost equal length.  As I turned away, however, a
-poster on a nearby wall quickly settled my plans.  It announced a great
-bullfight in Bayonne the next afternoon, with Quinito, Mazzatinito, and
-Regaterm, among the most famous of Spain's matadores--far more so than
-any it had been my fortune to see in that country.
-
-I sped away at once along a macadamed highway at the base of the
-Pyrenees beside a clear river--a mere "rivière" to the French, but one
-that would have been a mighty stream in Spain.  Its banks were thickly
-grown with willows.  On the other hand the mountain wall, no less green,
-rose sheer above me, bringing an unusually early sunset.  Along the way
-I met several old men, all Basques, who noting that I also wore the
-boína greeted me in their native "Eúscarra."  Not a word of any other
-tongue could they speak; and when I shook my head hopelessly at their
-hermetical language, they halted to gaze after me with expressions of
-deep perplexity. So, too, in the mountain-top village of Bidarry to
-which I climbed long after dark after a dip in the river, all speech was
-Basque; though some of the younger inhabitants, finding I was of their
-race only from the cap upward, fell to talking to me in fluent French or
-Spanish.
-
-The first hours of the following clay were in the highest degree
-pleasant.  Thereafter the country grew hilly, the sun torrid, and as I
-was forced to set the sharpest pace to reach the bullring by four. I put
-in as dripping a half-day as at any time during the summer; and I have
-yet to be more nearly incinerated in this life than in the sol of the
-great "Place des Taureaux" of Bayonne, crushed between a workman in
-corduroys and a Zouave in the thickest woolen uniform the loom weaves.
-
-The fight, like the ring, was Spanish in every particular, though the
-programmes were printed in French.  It was by all odds the greatest
-córrida I was privileged to attend during the summer, for the three
-matadores stand in the front rank of their profession.  Yet it was
-somehow far less exhilarating than those I had seen in Spain.  One had a
-feeling that these past masters were running far less risk than their
-younger colleagues; one enjoyed their dexterity as one enjoys a seasoned
-public speaker, yet the performance lacked just the thrill of
-amateurishness.
-
-Here, too, I saw Spain's greatest picador, the only one indeed I ever
-saw accomplish what the picador is supposed to do,--to hold off the bull
-with his _garrocha_.  This he did repeatedly, placing his lance so
-unerringly that he stopped the animal's most furious charges and forced
-him to retire bellowing with rage and with blood trickling down over his
-shoulders.  In all the afternoon this king of the pike-pole had but one
-horse killed under him.  It was in connection with this one fall that
-Quinito, the boldest of the matadores, won by his daring such applause
-as seemed to shake the Pyrenees behind us.  Moreno lay half buried under
-his dead horse, in more than imminent danger of being gored to death by
-the bull raging above him.  In vain the anxious caudrilla flaunted their
-cloaks.  All at once Quinito stepped empty handed into the ring and
-caught the animal by the tail.  Away the brute dashed across the plaza,
-twisting this way and that, but unable to bring his horns nearer than an
-inch or two of his tormentor who, biding his time, let go and vaulted
-lightly over the barrier.
-
-I quitted Bayonne with the dawn and for four days following marched
-steadily on across the great Landes of France.  Miles upon miles the
-broad highway stretched unswerving before me through an ultra-flat
-country between endless forests of pine. On the trunk of every tree hung
-a sort of flowerpot to catch the dripping pitch.  There was almost no
-agriculture, nothing but pine-trees stretching away in regular rows in
-every direction, a solitude broken only by the sighing of the wind
-sweeping across the flatlands, where one could shout to the full
-capacity of one's lungs without awakening other response than long
-rolling echoes.  Once in a while a pitch-gatherer flitted among the
-trees; less often the highway crossed a rusty and apparently trainless
-railroad at the solitary stations of which were tumbled hundreds of
-barrels of pitch.
-
-My shoes wore out, those very oxfords "custom-made" in America and
-honestly tapped in Toledo, and I was forced to continue the tramp in
-alpargatas, or what had here changed their name to _sandales_.  As my
-twenty-franc piece melted away a wondering began to grow upon me whether
-I was really homeward bound after all; so myriad are the mishaps that
-may befall a mere letter.
-
-Still the unswerving road continued, the endless forests stretched
-ahead.  Such few persons as I met scowled at me in the approved French
-fashion, never once imitating the cheery greeting of the Spaniard. Now
-and again a man-slaughtering automobile tore by like some messenger to
-or from, the infernal regions, recalling by contrast one of the chief
-charms of the land I had left behind.  Hardly one of those destroyers of
-peace and tranquillity had I seen or heard in all Spain.
-
-Four months afoot had not improved my outward appearance.  It was not
-strange that the post-office officials of Bordeaux stared at me long and
-suspiciously when I arrived at length one afternoon with a single franc
-in my pocket.  The letter was there. When I had, after the unwinding of
-endless red tape, collected the amount of the order, my journey seemed
-over indeed.
-
-The "Agents Maritimes" to whom I applied accepted me readily enough as
-an emigrant to America, agreeing to pick me up in Bordeaux and set me
-down unstarved in New York for the net sum of two hundred and three
-francs.  But there came a hitch in the proceedings.  The agent was
-firing at me with Gaelic speed the questions prescribed by our exacting
-government--"Name?" "Age?" "Profession?"--and setting down the answers
-almost before I gave them, when:
-
-"Have you contracted to work in the United States?"
-
-"Oui, monsieur."
-
-He stopped like a canvas canoe that has struck a snag.
-
-"C'est impossible," he announced, closing his book of blanks with a
-thump.  "We cannot of course sell you a ticket."
-
-I plunged at once into an explanation.  I advanced the information that
-the contract labor law was not framed to shut out American citizens. I
-protested that I had already toiled a year under the contract in
-question, and for my sins must return to toil another.  I made no
-headway whatever.
-
-"It is the law of the United States," he snapped. "Voilà!  C'est assez."
-
-Luckily I had a day to spare.  By dint of appealing to every maritime
-authority in the city I convinced the agent at last of his error.  But
-it was none too soon.  With my bundle and ticket in one hand and a sort
-of meal-sack tag to tie in my lapel--if I so chose--in the other, I
-tumbled into the night train for Paris just as its wheels began to turn.
-Emigrant tickets are not good in France by day.  There was one other
-tagged passenger in the compartment, a heavy-mannered young peasant
-likewise wearing a boína.  Being thus drawn together we fell gradually;
-into conversation.  He was at first exceeding chary, with the two-fold
-canniness of the Basque and of the untraveled rustic whose native
-village has warned him for weeks to beware wily strangers.  When I
-displayed my ticket, however, he lost at once his suspicion and, drawing
-out his own, proposed that we make the journey as partners.  He was
-bound for Idaho.  We did not, however, exchange ideas with partner-like
-ease, for though he had passed his twenty-five years in the province of
-Guipuzcoa he spoke little Spanish.
-
-Near midnight a few passengers alighted and I fell into a cramped and
-restless sort of dog-sleep from which I awoke as we screamed into
-Versailles.  When we descended at the Montparnasse station we were
-joined by three more Basques from another compartment.  They, too, wore
-boínas and, like my companion, in lieu of coats, smocks reaching almost
-to the knees.  They were from near Pamplona and had tickets from
-Bordeaux to Fresno, California, having taken this route to avoid the
-difficulties of leaving Spain by sea.
-
-The Paris agent of the "American Line" did not meet us in silk hat and
-with open arms; but when we had shivered about the station something
-over an hour an unshaven Italian of forty, with lettered cap and a
-remarkable assortment of unlearned tongues picked us up and bore us away
-by omnibus to his "Cucina Italiana" in the Passage Moulin.  Breakfast
-over, I invited my fellow-emigrants to view Paris under my leadership.
-They accepted, after long consultation, and we marched away along the
-Rue de Lyon to the site of the Bastille, then on into the roar of the
-city, the Spaniards so helplessly overwhelmed by the surrounding sights
-and sounds that I was called upon times without number to save them
-being run down.  At length we crossed to the island and, the morgue
-being closed, entered Notre Dame. I had hitherto credited Catholic
-churches with being the most democratic of institutions.  Hardly were we
-inside, however, when a priest steamed down upon my companions.
-
-"Sortez de suite!" he commanded.  "Get out! How dare you enter the
-sacred cathedral in blouses!"
-
-The Basques stared at him open-mouthed, now and then nervously wiping
-their hands on the offending smocks.  I passed on and they followed,
-pausing where I paused, to gape at whatever I looked upon. The priest
-danced shouting about them.  They smiled at him gratefully, as if they
-fancied he were explaining to them the wonders of the edifice.  His
-commands grew vociferous.
-
-"Ces messieurs, sir," I remarked at last, "are Spaniards and do not
-understand a word of French."
-
-"You then, tell them to get out at once!" he cried angrily.
-
-"You must pardon me, monsieur," I protested, "if I do not presume to
-appoint myself interpreter to your cathedral."
-
-We continued our way, strolling down one nave to the altar, sauntering
-back along the other toward the entrance, the priest still prancing
-about us.  In the doorway the Basques turned to thank him by signs for
-his kindness and backed away devoutedly crossing themselves.
-
-At the Louvre, however, the smock-wearers were halted at the door by two
-stocky officials, and we wandered on into the Tuileries Gardens.  There
-the quartet balked.  These hardy mountaineers, accustomed to trudge all
-day on steep hillsides behind their burros, were worn out by a few miles
-of strolling on city pavements.  For an hour they sat doggedly in a
-bench before I could cajole them a few yards further to the Place de la
-Concorde to board a Seine steamer and return to the Cucina.  I left them
-there and returned alone to while away the afternoon among my old haunts
-in the Latin Quarter.
-
-Soon after dark the razorless son of Italy took us once more in tow and,
-climbing to the imperial of an omnibus, we rolled away through the
-brilliant boulevards to the gare St. Lazare.  Here was assembled an army
-of emigrants male and female, of all ages and various distances from
-their last soaping. In due time we were admitted to the platform.  A
-third-class coach marked "Cherbourg" stood near at hand.  I stepped upon
-the running-board to open a door.  A station official caught me by the
-coat-tail with an oath and a violence that would have landed me on the
-back of my head but for my grip on the door handle.  Being untrained to
-such treatment, I thrust out an alpargata-shod foot mule-fashion behind
-me.  The official went to sit down dejectedly on the further edge of the
-platform.  By and by he came back to shake his fist in my face.  I spoke
-to him in his own tongue and he at once subsided, crying:
-
-"Tiens!  I thought you were one of those animals there."
-
-We were finally stuffed into four cars, so close we were obliged to lie
-all night with our legs in one another's laps.  The weather was arctic,
-and we slept not a wink.  Early in the morning we disentangled moody and
-silent in Cherbourg.  Another unshaven agent took charge of my
-companions' baggage with the rest, promising it should be returned the
-moment they were aboard ship.  I clung skeptically to my bundle.  We
-were herded together in a tavern and served coffee and bread, during the
-administration of which the agent collected our tickets and any proof
-that we had ever possessed them, and disappeared.  The day was wintry
-cold.  All the morning we marched shivering back and forth between the
-statue of Napoleon and the edge of the beach, the teeth of the
-south-born Basques chattering audibly.  At noon we jammed our way into
-the tavern again for soup, beef and poor cider, and were given
-rendezvous at two at one of the wharves.
-
-By that hour all were gathered.  It was after four, however, when a
-tender tied up alongside.  A man stepped forth with an armful of tickets
-and began croaking strange imitations of the names thereon.  I heard at
-last a noise that sounded not altogether unlike my own name and, no one
-else chancing to forestall me, marched on board to reclaim my
-credentials.  A muscular arm thrust me on through a passageway in which
-a Frenchman in uniform caught me suddenly by the head and turned up my
-eyelids with a sort of stiletto.  Before I could double a fist in
-protest another arm pushed me on. At six a signal ran up, we steamed out
-through the breakwater, and were soon tumbling up the gangway of the
-steamer _New York_.  At the top another doctor lay in wait, but
-forewarned, I flung open my passport, and flaunting it in his face,
-stepped unmolested on deck.
-
-Some four hundred third-class passengers had boarded the steamer in
-England, and no small percentage of the berths were already occupied.
-Unlike the nests of the _Prinzessin_, however, they might reasonably be
-called berths, for though they offered no luxury, or indeed privacy,
-being two hundred in a section, the quarters were ventilated,
-well-lighted, and to a certain extent clean.  I stepped to the nearest
-unoccupied bunk and was about to toss my bundle into it when a young
-steward in shirt-sleeves and apron sprang at me.
-
-"No good, John," he shouted, in Cockney accents and striving to add
-force to his remarks by a clumsy pantomime.  "Berth take.  No more.  No
-good, John.  All gone.  But--" jerking his head sidewise--"Pst!  John!
-I know one good berth.  One dollar--" holding up a hand with forefinger
-and thumb in the form of that over-popular object--"All take, Joh--"
-
-"Say, what t'ell's the game, anyhow, mate?" I interrupted.
-
-His legs all but wilted under him.
-
-"Sye, ol' man," he cried, patting me on the shoulder.  "S'elp me, I took
-you for one o' these waps, as why shouldn't I, in that there sky-piece
-an' make-up?  Of course you can 'ave the berth. Or sye, over 'ere by the
-port'ole's a far 'an'somer one.  There y' are.  Now, mite, if ever I can
-'elp you out--" and he was still chattering when I climbed again on
-deck.
-
-Unfortunately, in the rough and tumble of embarking I had lost sight of
-the Spaniards.  When I found them again every berth was really taken,
-for there was a shortage--or rather considerably more than the legal
-number of tickets had been sold; and the quartet, having withstood the
-blackmail, were among those unprovided.  That night they slept, if at
-all, on the bare deck.  Next day I protested to the third-class steward
-and he spread for them two sacks of straw on a lower hatch.  There, too,
-the icy sea air circulated freely.  Worst of all, in spite of the solemn
-promises of the agent, their bags, in which they had packed not only
-blankets and heavier garments, but meat, bread, fruit, cheese, and botas
-of wine sufficient to supply them royally during all the journey, had
-been stowed away in the hold.  For two days they showed, after the
-fashion of emigrants, no interest in gastronomic matters.  When appetite
-returned they could not eat American--or rather English food.  "No hay
-ajos!--It has no garlic!" they complained.  Once or twice I acted as
-agent between them and an under cook who sneaked out of the galley with
-a roast chicken under his jacket, but they grew visibly leaner day by
-day.
-
-On the whole steerage life on the New York was endurable.  The
-third-class fare was on a par with most English cooking,--well-meant but
-otherwise uncommendable.  The tables and dishes were moderately clean,
-the waiters, expecting a sixpence tip at the end of the passage, were
-almost obliging.  In the steerage dining-room, large and airy, was a
-piano around which we gathered of an evening to chat, or to croak
-old-fashioned songs.  Here it was that I felt the full force of my long
-total abstinence from English.  It was days before I could talk
-fluently; many a time my tongue clattered about a full half-minute in
-quest of some quite everyday word.
-
-On the fourth day out the oldest of the Spaniards appealed to me for the
-twentieth time to intercede for them with the third-class steward.
-
-"Hombre," I answered, "it is useless; I have talked myself hoarse.  Go
-to him yourself and it may have some effect."
-
-"But he understands neither Castilian nor Eúscarra!" cried the Basque.
-
-"No matter," I replied.  "He is a man in such and such a uniform.  When
-you run across him touch him on the sleeve and lay your head sidewise on
-your hand--the pantomime for sleep the world over--and he will remember
-your case."
-
-An hour or more afterward I was aroused from reading a book in an
-alleyway aft by the third-class steward.
-
-"I say," he cried, "will you come and see what the bloomin' saints is
-biting these Spanish chaps? They ayn't no one else can chin their
-lingo."
-
-I followed him forward.  Before the dispensary stood a wondering and
-sympathetic group, in the center of which was the Basque making wry
-faces and groaning, and the ship's surgeon looking almost frightened.
-
-"What's up?" I asked.
-
-"Blow me if I know!" cried the medicine-man. "This chap comes and
-touches me on the arm and holds his hand against his cheek.  I gave him
-a dose for toothache, and the beggar 's been howling ever since.  Funny
-sort of creatures."
-
-The Spaniards got no berth during the voyage, though I carried their
-appeal in person to the captain.  They were still encamped on the lower
-hatch on the morning when the land-fever drew us on deck at dawn.  Soon
-appeared a light-ship, then land, a view of the charred ruins of Coney
-Island, then a gasp of wonder from the emigrants as the sky-scrapers
-burst on their sight.  We steamed slowly up the harbor, checked by mail,
-custom, and doctor's boats, and tied up at a wharf early in the
-afternoon.  Rain was pouring.  I appeared before a commissioner in the
-second cabin to establish my nationality, bade the Basques farewell as
-they were leaving for Ellis Island, and scudded away through the deluge.
-In my pocket was exactly six cents. I caught up an evening paper and
-with the last coin in hand dived down into the Subway.
-
-
-    The Summer's Expense Account:
-    Transportation ...................  $90.
-    Food and Lodging .................   55.
-    Bullfights, sights, souvenirs ....   10.
-    Miscellaneous ....................   17.
-                                       -----
-                                       $172
-
-
-
-
-
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR MONTHS AFOOT IN SPAIN ***
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