"The debt is on my side, señor," said the chulo, looking steadily into the pallid face of the young cavalier. "You gave me such a message last night as was never brought to me by shaven monk or friar,—a message that Diego will never forget. Lean on my arm, señor; there's fresher air and a seat near the entrance. Hark! how the people are shouting and yelling now in the streets! They are as mad in their rush after freedom as the bull when the toril is opened, and he bursts into the circus, ready to tear down everything that stands in his way! It is to be hoped," added the chulo, uttering the words under his breath, "that this wild, excited people meet not the same fate as the bull!"
CHAPTER XXX.
PURSUED.
We will now return to an English acquaintance.
If there was one thing on which Mr. Passmore prided himself more than another, it was on being a steady man of business, one "who stuck to his work, and did not care to take a holiday from the first of January till the thirty-first of December."
But if Peter Passmore regularly gave his week-days to work, he as regularly gave his Sundays to amusement. No idea of devotion was linked with the Sabbath in the mind of the money-making man. Passmore considered time wasted that was spent on anything that brought no immediate return of worldly profit or pleasure.
As surely as Sunday came round, unless Seville offered some peculiar attraction, so surely at Mr. Passmore's door appeared a travelling carriage drawn by two stout horses. This was to bear the manufacturer to some agreeable spot several miles out of the city, where he could, as he expressed it, "get beyond hearing of the din of the bells of Seville, and the smell of its cigarillos." A picnic basket was always carefully placed in the carriage,—a basket well filled with bottles of champagne, pâtés-de-foie-gras, or other such portable dainties. For Passmore was not a man to content himself with such fare as he might find in a Spanish posada. "I'll not make my Sunday dinner off puchero or saffron-soup," he would say, "or dishes prepared with oil, the very smell of which would spoil the appetite of a trooper!"