A saddle for femininity—September fairs—Three kinds of hostelries—A night at the street door—Buñolitos—Mosquitoes and holy water—All the fun of the fair—The etiquette of mendicancy—A Spanish circus—A cinematograph—Drunk but still courteous—The diligence.
A saddle for femininity—September fairs—Three kinds of hostelries—A night at the street door—Buñolitos—Mosquitoes and holy water—All the fun of the fair—The etiquette of mendicancy—A Spanish circus—A cinematograph—Drunk but still courteous—The diligence.
There are three perfect months for exploring the mountains and visiting remote hills, valleys, and villages in the leisurely way only to be done on horse, mule, or donkey back. One is April, but then one ought to be in Seville for the most typical fair in Western Europe; another is May, but then one must be in Granada for the nightingales and the roses which make the Alhambra a dream of delight; the third is September, when grapes, peaches, and melons are in their prime, when the weather though brilliantly sunny is no longer oppressively hot, and the high roads are gay with swarming herds of creatures moving from fair to fair, and forming with their owners a series of living pictures which make the longest journey enjoyable.
For a woman no longer young, a donkey withjamugasand a pack mule is the ideal mode of transit over the mountains. If you possess yourownjamugas, as I do, with the leathern straps that support them on three sides fitted to your measure, there is no more comfortable riding seat. But perhaps I ought to explain what thejamugasconsist of, for they are rarely seen nowadays except in mountain towns, and unless seen are not easily imagined.
According to the dictionary of the Spanish Academy the word is derived from the Basquezamucac, “a seat intended for femininity to mount on any kind of beast of burden.” But although the name may have been originally Basque, the apparatus is Oriental, for one sees just the same sort of thing in Morocco and in the East, only there it is hooded to hide all the femininity from curious eyes.
The basis is simply a folding trestle, like that for a table, with cross-straps to prevent the trestle from opening too wide. This is placed on theaparejoof the beast of burden, theaparejobeing a stout pad of straw used to prevent thejamugasor the panniers, as the case may be, from galling the animal’s back. It is fixed firmly with innumerable twists and turns of tightly knotted cord, and a folded blanket is laid across the donkey’s back to make your seat soft. As a matter of fact you generally feel the cord through the blanket, but to obviate this you can use a pillow, which is supplied if desired with the donkey, pillow-case and all. For the information of my fellow-femininity I may add that I personally take a cushion of my own to sit upon, and have the pillow tied to the strap which forms the back of thejamugas, andthus save myself from jolts and jars on rough ground, no small advantage on a long journey. Between the blanket and the cushion a gaily coloured cotton cloth covers theaparejoand most of the donkey, and streams out behind and around when you meet the wind. The oldest and most delicate femininity can ride in this arm-chair, for it amounts to that, and I have travelled all day long on myjamugasup hill and down dale, and my sure-footed little donkey has never tripped or turned a hair.
It is slow progress, certainly, but what of that, when at every fresh step fresh beauty is revealed, and all your way your guide, as he leads the sumpter mule with your inappropriate modern “grip” or suit-case in its panniers, entertains you with his discourse, or wakes the echoes with his song, for he sings most of the way, “to bring good luck.”
The worst of it is that nowadays one has to go a long way by rail and road before one reaches country remote enough forjamugas: one is lucky if half a charming tour can be covered on a donkey. Such was my fortune one sunny September, and I never felt more sorry than when I had to come back to the railway after a fortnight spent on the hills. But the first part of the journey was not without incident, as I will now relate.
I left the train at Jerez, the sherry city with its huge bodegas full of valuable wine, its cosmopolitan hotel, and its numerous millionaires. From there to Arcos, thirty kilometres distant along a mountain road continually increasing in beauty, a motor bustakes one in about two hours. Arcos is a town of 20,000 inhabitants, perched on the steepest of hills, with a Tartessian-Roman-Arabic castle on the very top, altered and restored like many others in this country by the great Dukes of Arcos, who in the fifteenth century were the rivals in wealth and political power of the Medina Sidonia family.
From an Arabic loggia, here calledmirador, which means literally “view place,” we obtain a marvellous panorama of the mountains, with a bird’s-eye view of a fertile valley in the foreground, encircled by the winding Guadalete. It is truly a bird’s-eye view, for thevega, as the cultivated valley is called, lies fully five hundred feet below the sheer cliff on which the castle stands, and people walking on it look about six inches high. The cliff is so steep that in many places even the ubiquitous cactus cannot take hold, and here vultures and eagles build their nests in security, for no little boy can throw stones anywhere near them. Even the goats can only clamber up a little way at the base, where the detritus of ages has formed a sharply sloping rise extending fifty or sixty feet up from the river and the new high road which leads from Arcos to El Bosque. That view alone is worth a stop at Arcos, but it is by no means the only “sight,” for the ancient town is full of Roman, Arabic, and Renaissance remains, and the fourteenth-century mother church contains a wonderful gold chalice given by one of the ducal family when the church was built—a relic which no one interested in goldsmith’s work should miss. This church,which the people call their cathedral, overlooks a square at the foot of the castle, and that square in May is a mass of golden mimosa. I have never seen such a glow of colour or smelt such overpowering sweetness from trees of that kind.
Part of the castle was granted to the Town Council for their hall in the sixteenth century, and in one of the rooms, which was the chapel of the Dukes of Arcos, are preserved no less than eleven grants to the city bearing the signature of Alfonso the Learned, who won it from the Almohad Moors in 1284 with the help of his ally Al Ahmar, the Arab king of Granada.
The Dukes of Arcos held sway here for over two hundred years, until all memory of the friendship of Alfonso and his father St. Ferdinand with the Moslems of Granada was forgotten in the ambition of the “Catholic Kings,” Ferdinand and Isabella, to make a united kingdom of Spain. Then, when Andalucia was all a-fire with ruthless war, Arcos fell on evil days, for lying as she does on the frontier of the kingdom of Granada (hence her full name, which is Arcos de la Frontera), the Moslems naturally seized the opportunity to try again and again to recover this strong outpost of their former dominion. Until nearly the end of the war the castle held out, but in 1484 the Moslems possessed themselves of the city, and the Duchess, who was defending the castle, was so hard pressed that surrender seemed inevitable. The Duke was away besieging Alhama by the Queen’s orders, and although the Duchess contrived to send a message to her husband tellinghim of her straits, Isabella could not spare him and his troops even to rescue his wife.
The only knight who could help was the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was known to be somewhere in the district, on his way from Seville with reinforcements for the Queen. But Medina Sidonia and Arcos had been at daggers-drawn for generations. It was almost as bitter and prolonged a feud as that of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, and none of the Arcos faction dreamed of appealing to Medina Sidonia for help.
Medina Sidonia, however, was a very chivalrous gentleman. The tidings of the lady’s plight reached him as he lay before Setenil (so called, according to local etymology, because the Romans besieged it seven times—septem=sete—and took nothing—nil!) some twenty miles from Arcos. He turned back at once with half of his troops, drove the Moslems out of the town, left a strong guard with the rescued lady, and then returned to continue the siege of the still stronger fortress of Setenil, and to play his part in the taking of Alhama.
If Medina Sidonia had not brought the feud between the two families thus dramatically to an end Arcos would have had to capitulate, as its neighbour Zahara had already done, and once the Moslems had recovered the four strategic points, Arcos, Zahara, Setenil, and Ronda, the war against Granada might have had a different ending.
We do not find this story in the published histories of Ferdinand and Isabella, but it is written in the archives of the city of Arcos and in those ofthe Arcos family, now, alas! mouldering in a locked room in one of the great towers of the castle, which is falling to ruin because its owners cannot afford to keep it up.
With regret I tore myself away from the castle, whose once warlike keep is now a garden of roses, orange trees, jessamine, and geraniums grown into bushes with age. But I had to get on to Bornos and Villamartín on the way to Algodonales, where I was to change the diligence for the donkey.
Of that stage of the road the less said the better. Much of it was dull, all of it was dusty, and the diligence was packed to its utmost capacity, for it was the eve of the Villamartín September Fair, and the rattling old shandridan, built to carry eight or ten passengers in all, had five horses instead of three, and no less than twenty-seven people were stowed inside, on the box, and on the roof. Every one declared that it was excessively dangerous, and made a great joke of the fact; and as Spanish drivers make a point of whipping up their horses when they near the bottom of a hill, in order to take the next rise on the run, and the over-loaded machine rocked like a ship in a storm on every such occasion, it was little short of a miracle that we arrived at Villamartín alive.
Arrive we did, however, and at once found ourselves in all the fun of the fair.
The onlyfondain the place looked out on the main square. The polite name forfonda(the Arabicfondak) in English is hotel, and thefondaprofesses to provide food and beds for its customers; unlike theparador(stopping-place), which only gives beds to travellers providing their own food, and theposada(rest-house), which is really little more than a stable for animals with some sort of shelter attached for the people who belong to them. Our Villamartín “hotel” only had three or four bedrooms and no sitting-room at all, the food being served in a passage through which one passed from the street to the staircase, or one might rather say step-ladder, leading up to an open gallery containing one of the convenient and comfortable folding bedsteads calledcatres, minus a mattress; one broken-backed chair, and nothing else. From this a narrow door led into a tiny bedroom which just held a bed and a washstand.
We had no choice but to stay here. The humble Spanish friends with whom I was travelling to their home at Algodonales—a mother and son—insisted on my taking the bedroom, although they gladly accepted my invitation to share the washstand. The mother said she could sleep on thecatrewith a pillow from my bed, and the boy on the floor alongside, with his head on my travelling-bag. Every other corner in the house was full for the fair, and even this modest accommodation could only be had for one night. Poor as it was, the bedding and the linen were clean, and we thought ourselves lucky to get a room at all.
But we rashly arranged a pillow and rug for Rosario on thecatrebefore going out to see the town, and when we got back, thecatre, the pillow,and even the broken-backed chair had been carried off for another customer, and my poor friends had just to sit downstairs at the street door and amuse themselves as best they could till it was time to start. This, however, was not quite the hardship it sounds, for all Spaniards love to turn night into day; and their main concern was lest I should be uncomfortable.
We were to start by diligence for Algodonales, our final destination, at 3 a.m., and pretty Rosario had agreed to let me sleep till two—if I could, which seemed doubtful in view of the incessant noise in the main street on which my tiny window looked. I did sleep, notwithstanding the noise, and woke to find the sun streaming in, and the town alive with goatherds and their flocks, donkeys loaded with fruit and vegetables, women with baskets of eggs and live fowls tied together by the legs and distressfully clucking, and a continual stream of ponies, mules, cows, calves, pigs, sheep, and oxen coming in from the country to the fair; while all along the footwalks little canvas-covered sweet-stalls had sprung up like mushrooms in the night. I had slept through all the riot of the small hours, and the diligence had either not gone at 3 a.m. or had gone without me.
I sprang up and opened my door, wondering if Rosario had also overslept the appointed hour. There she was with a cup of coffee for me, smiling as brightly as ever, but her curly hair was ruffled and she had a generally dishevelled appearance. The diligence had not gone. Something was wrongwith the wheels, or the harness, or the horses, or the driver, no one knew exactly what; but Rosario thought that the truth was probably that the driver wanted to do some business in the fair. Anyhow the diligence did not start, and Rosario and her boy had sat all night long in their chairs, with various other visitors to the town, who like themselves could get no beds.
Relieved of their anxiety lest I should be vexed at the delay, the mother and son quickly brightened up, and we agreed that as we had to stay there all day we would get all the fun we could out of it. Rosario after a wash and a brush in my room looked as fresh as if she had slept in her own comfortable bed, and as for the boy, he was at an age to enjoy anything.
The innkeeper flatly declined to provide us with coffee or anything else for breakfast, so we went out and atebuñolitos, a peculiar dainty largely in evidence at these country fairs, where booths are set up entirely for their sale. My friends took me to the largest and gayest of the two tents already opened, which had white muslin curtains tied together in the middle with streamers of red and yellow calico, just like the sweet-stalls in Syria. An overpowering smell of boiling oil greeted our nostrils as we approached, and such was the frizzling and the smoke that we could hardly see thebuñolera, a stout lady in a brown skirt, white apron, and blue cross-over, with a red handkerchief picturesquely knotted round her head. She saw us, however, and promptly turned to serve us with theodd product of her cooking—a mixture of flour and water squeezed through a funnel into a vast frying-pan and coiled round and round as it fried, until the whole was deftly thrown out unbroken on the dish.Buñolitosare crisp and tempting and really delicious to eat, provided only that the oil be good and of last year’s milling; for the new oil has an abominable smell and taste which only a native can endure.
This was good oil, and thebuñolerawas an artist. We ate all we could, and be it observed that I fell little short of my companions in the quantity consumed. We paid a penny a piece for our breakfast, and then strolled up the hill to the Parish Church, for it was Sunday and a festival Mass was in progress.
Very few people were present. A couple of nuns, a few ladies shrouded in black gauze veils falling over their shoulders and down to their knees,—a graceful Oriental survival which lends dignity to the stoutest old dowager,—two or three peasants with handkerchiefs on their heads, and the usual group of beggars about the door.
I got past these last without trouble by using the accepted formulas, “Pardon me, brother, for God’s sake,” or “May God support you”; both of which mean that one consigns them to the mercy of Providence because one has no mercy of one’s own for them. And if this seems rather hard-hearted, let me point out that in remote places, where foreigners are never seen from one year’s end to another, the gift of a penny to a single beggar willbe a sowing of the dragon’s teeth to raise up as by magic a swarm of from twenty to fifty more, who pursue one with pitiful appeals that change to imprecations and even stone-throwing, unless one proceeds to dole out pennies all round. One may therefore be thankful that the ceremonious response above quoted seldom fails of its effect, it being a matter of etiquette in Spanish mendicant circles politely to accept the time-worn courtesy in lieu of coin of the realm. It has often acted like a charm in my own experience, and I can call to mind brutal-looking men with some affliction or other which by no means hampered their physical power for violence, who stopped short and turned away with a gentle “Go with God” instead of a rude retort, when I answered their petitions withPerdóneme, hermano.
The Mass ended a few minutes after we went in, and as I stood by the main door studying the not very interesting architecture of the church, I suddenly felt a wet finger on my forehead. It was one of the nuns, who, noticing that I had failed to cross myself with holy water, was doing it for me. I appreciated her good intention, but did not appreciate that particular holy water, for the marble vessel was alive with mosquito grubs, whose progenitors swarmed round us where we stood. I knew the holy water was seldom changed in these country churches, but never had I seen any quite so dirty as that.
A clamour of brass instruments drew us out. It was the town band making a round of the chiefstreets to announce that the fair had begun. It was a much better band than we should find in many English country towns of a similar size, and indeed the level of the brass bands is rather high here—a fact I cannot explain, for among amateurs one practically never hears any concerted music at all, and even when two performers sing together on the stage in the minor theatres, it is as often as not in unison. This band had already woke the town on its first round at 6 a.m., when the church bells were ringing for early Mass, and now as soon as its performance came to an end, a sort of blaring roar from a merry-go-round began and continued at intervals throughout the rest of the day. I had never imagined, far less heard, anything like the noise of that fair in the daytime; but worse was reserved for the night.
Many hours were yet to pass, however, before night fell, and I must say they did not hang heavily, for the people and their animals formed a series of moving pictures which it would need the brush of a Sorolla or a Zuloaga to do justice to. One especially took my fancy. Two pretty girls (and the mountain people are as a rule remarkably handsome), dressed in beautifully laundered print gowns with flowers in their sleek black hair, rode together on a white horse covered with the brilliantly embroidered trappings familiar to us in pictures of the last century and still in common use in the Sierras. One girl sat facing one way and the other the other, with their arms round each other’s waists, and a slim lad in a round Cordovese hat, a brown velvet jacket, and richlyembroidered leather overalls,[5]led the horse by a purple-and-white halter made of twisted aloe fibre. On a donkey alongside were slung the girls’ worldly goods, consisting of a box almost as large as the donkey, brilliantly yellow with new paint that gleamed golden in the morning sun, balanced by a large bundle tied up in a crimson wrapper, and topped by a sheaf of pale maize stalks, which would be the donkey’s provender during the fair. It was a riot of youth and beauty and colour and gaiety which would have been the chance of a lifetime for a painter, but sad to say no painter was there to immortalise the scene.
In the afternoon we went to see a circus in the Bull Ring, and in company with the rank and fashion of the town we paid one peseta apiece for what was described on the programme as a “stall.” The “stalls” were honest reed-seated chairs, such as are sold new for two pesetas, but were borrowed on this occasion from the kindly neighbours and brought in by half-dozens at a time, as the aristocratic part of the audience increased.
The show was advertised for five o’clock, but did not begin till about six, by which time the shady side of the ring was crowded, and the stalls had almost surrounded the very small circle railed in and sanded for the performers. We first had a tumbler with a week’s beard, dressed in crimson satin and red cotton stockings, who usually cameto grief in his feats, but never failed to draw applause. Followed a highly coloured young lady whom we had seen at the door taking tickets, and who now juggled with knives and cubes of wood, which invariably landed on the ground instead of on the table; a clown, in the same crimson satin and red cotton stockings, who played the fiddle quite nicely, but was interrupted by another clown with a feather brush, who always stopped the music by tickling the violinist’s nose at the third or fourth bar, to the intense delight of the audience; and then another highly rouged lady, past her first youth, who exhibited three rather sad little performing dogs.
An acrobat, again in the crimson satin and red cotton stockings, now came on, after great preparations and testing of wires, to perform a trapeze act. There seemed to be some sort of hitch about starting, which was explained when the acrobat with a sweet smile indicated that we had been seated by the attendants immediately under his taking-off platform, as indeed we were, unknown to ourselves. So we and our immediate neighbours picked up our chairs and retired, while the acrobat did some rather pretty swinging.
The unshaven tumbler then reappeared, now dressed in a pilot coat and brown trousers, but still unshaven, and we discovered that what the advertisements called an “automovil race” was about to take place. It was in fact a terribly gimcrack “loop-the-loop” affair, and the performer looked haggard with nervousness as he examined his wires and pulleys.
In retiring from the trapeze we had unconsciously planted ourselves just where the “automovil” must inevitably smash into us all; no attempt having been made to indicate a danger zone. No one waited to be asked to retire this time. As soon as we saw the bold chauffeur climb his scaffold and realised what was going to happen, we just got up and bolted like rabbits, all quite as frightened as the chauffeur looked. We did not, however, omit to carry our chairs with us. The band struck up an inappropriate gipsy dance, the performer whirled down, and we settled into our seats with a sigh of relief that he and we had escaped with our lives.
But even this was not the last time we were moved on, for the finale was a play in pantomime, in which the middle-aged lady played the heroine, in a long train which she carefully held up all the time; the other lady played the young lover in yellow tights and a red cloak; the tumbler, the clowns, and the manager, all wearing Russian caps and blouses trimmed with rabbit-skin over their workaday trousers, interfered each after his manner with the course of true love; and the stout acrobat with a scarlet-horned hood over the inevitable crimson satin and red stockings, appeared as a friendly devil and made all the stage furniture dance to distract the attention of the rest of the company from the antics of the lovers. The devil ended by letting off a lot of fireworks right in front of the “stalls,” and this time we got up and ran, regardless of our chairs. It was not as dangerous as it looked, however, for the fireworks promptlyfizzled out, and I for one was so weak with laughter by then that I could not even start when a cracker went off under my nose.
The whole centre of the ring had been invaded by a swarm of young men and lads of the peasant class, who obviously had not paid a peseta for the privilege. The manager, wearing a monstrous Emperor William moustache fiercely curling up to his eyebrows, had at intervals blandly requested them to retire and not incommode the ladies. They always retired with perfect politeness, to return again the moment his back was turned. When the circus was over this portion of the audience at once blocked the only exit, and gave us time to observe the back of the scenery of the pantomime, which was remarkable. A sheet of painted canvas stood on end, held in place by some mysterious law of cohesion, for visible supports it had none; and how the red devil, who must have weighed a good fifteen stone, contrived to jump in and out of the window without bringing the whole thing down will always be for me an insoluble mystery.
Thefondawas less of an hotel than ever this evening, and we were warned that we must, willy-nilly, leave by the night diligence, because aviajante(commis-voyageur) had engaged my room and would want to go to bed when the Fair meeting of the Commercial Club closed about 2 a.m. But the fun of the Fair was not yet over for us, and the little window overlooking the main square now became for me a kind of Royal Box at the opera, music and all.
At nine o’clock the band took up its position under my window, and the fireworks began. Another point I have never quite understood is why Spanish fireworks even in remote little towns like Villamartín are always good; and how it is that every remote little town manages to keep its own firework-maker. But the profusion of devices in interlacing circles of arabesques leads me to suspect an Arabic origin for this as for so many other popular junkets in Spain.
The Villamartín fireworks were beautiful, differing from those of the big towns only in quantity, not at all in quality, and the set pieces were quite the most attractive to the crowd, whose inherited instincts are all for the arabesque in art.
After the fireworks came a cinematograph, still accompanied by the band, whose repertoire consisted of six pieces, very well played, which they had been repeating at intervals all day. The people grew wildly enthusiastic over the moving pictures, and shouted and laughed and clapped like children, at the runaway who upsets every one he meets as he evades his pursuers, at the illicit lover who hides under the dinner-table and turns it over so as to spill the soup into the lady’s lap, and at all the other stale old jokes which seemed to be brand-new to these unsophisticated southerners. There was no risk at all of our going to sleep and forgetting our diligence now. No one but a deaf mute could have closed an eye in the main square of Villamartín that night.
After midnight, when the cinematograph closed,I laid me down fondly imagining I might get a little sleep; but the clamour of the voices in no way diminished. On the contrary, as the night wore on it began to rise louder and louder, until it became a perfect roar. Now and then it would die down for a few minutes, until a boyish voice shouted something that I could not catch, when it began again worse than ever, still good-natured, but sounding ever more impatient, as if the self-restraint of the crowd were rapidly becoming exhausted.
At last, about half-past one, a distant noise like thunder made itself heard above all the human din, and then the crowd seemed to go perfectly mad, yelling and shouting like Bedlam let loose. It was time to get ready to leave anyhow, so I rose from my sleepless bed and went to the window.
Then I saw what it all meant. It was theencierro, the bringing in of the bulls for the bull-fight next day. In this case they were not full grown bulls; only year-old bullocks, and of these there were but two, the rest of the future victims being heifers. For fighting bulls cost a good deal of money, and Villamartín is a small town and not particularly rich: so the sportsmen of the ring here have to content themselves with the inexpensive heifer and “yarlin’,” as they say in Devon.
To hear the yells of delight raised when they came in sight, one would have thought that all Villamartín was out to receive the bullocks and their decoy: but as a matter of fact all Villamartínexcept the dregs had long gone home to bed, and the howling mob consisted entirely of a few men of mature years, financially interested in the bull-ring, and a crowd of boys and lads, the rag-tag and bobtail of the working classes, for the respectable working men and their families do not approve of the “sport.” These two elements in the Spanish social system nowadays form the immense majority of those who still support what is called “the national sport.” Yet tourists seem to imagine that they represent the nation! So well is it recognised by the governing classes that the bull-fight has ceased to appeal to any save the riff-raff and those to whom, in one capacity or another, it is a source of income, that legislative attempts have been made to forbid the bull-fights on Sunday, because if they only took place on week-days the aforesaid dregs of the working classes would find it difficult to attend at the cost of a day’s wages, and the whole brutal concern would soon come to an end. But the vested interests are tremendously strong, and capital has great power in Spain; so the bull-fight still goes on, and the tourists go to see it, and Spanish social reformers shrug their shoulders when they are told by foreigners that the first step to social reform in Spain must be the suppression of the bull-ring, which the foreigners’ entrance money largely helps to keep going, and of which their mere presence is supposed by amateurs to express approval.
But this is another of the tragedies of Spain, and Rosario and her boy, who hate the very nameof bull-fight, though they are mere peasants and never heard of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, did not talk about it that night with me as we watched the tumultuous passage of a particularly lively heifer across the square under my window. Setting aside humanitarian considerations, it was a picturesque sight enough, for the victims of the morrow, surrounded and steered by half a dozen stolid old cows with bells on their necks, were preceded and followed by thegarrochistas, those herders of the wild cattle, with the high-peaked saddles and great square stirrups and long poles with iron points, which form so effective a group on post-cards purporting to represent the everyday life of Spain. Some of the rabble had gone out to meet the procession with torches, and these still flared as the crowd surged by, making curious yellow cross-lights when they fell on the glare of the arc lights of the town.
I have been told that it was once proposed to start a branch of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals at Madrid, and that in order to obtain funds a great bull-fight was organised. I do not know whether Ben Trovato is responsible for this story, but I have myself met a member of that Society, an English lady of mature years, who refused to subscribe to an entertainment in Spain because it was to take place on a Sunday, and then quarrelled violently with her husband because he refused to take tickets for her for the bull-fight on Easter Day! This is a true story, though the well-known Italian raconteur might be proud tofather it. I remember also a British curate of extreme evangelical opinions, who gave at a luncheon party a full, true, and particular account, with realistic details, of the disembowelling of a horse and the wounding of atorerothat he had witnessed, embellished with the usual expressions of horror at the innate degradation of a nation which supported such barbarities. Some unkind person present remarked that it was believed that the Bishop of Gibraltar objected to his chaplains attending the bull-fight; to which the ingenuous curate replied: “Ah, but you see I went in without my clerical collar”—the fatuous immorality of which remark closed the conversation.
I was not altogether sorry when the time came to start for Algodonales. I had never heard such prolonged and uncontrolled noise made by human beings before, and much though the whole thing had amused me I do not care if I never hear such a noise again. When we made our way out into the brilliantly lighted square most of the crowd appeared to be drunk, but riff-raff though they might be, they were civil to the last, and good-naturedly lurched aside in a bunch to make room for us to pass into the comparative darkness of the street where the diligence awaited us, we, needless to say, being the only passengers who wished to leave the town just then.
A PREHISTORIC WEIR.
A PREHISTORIC WEIR.