Light sleepers abominate the whole tribe; for they have powerful voices, and their melodious bellow, “Twelve o’clock, and all serene!”—(the refrain to which they owe their title)—is sure to arouse all the dogs that happen to have stopped barking since eleven. It sounds such gratuitous worry to make night hideous because the weather is fine.
But it seems quite a passion with Spaniards to know how the time is progressing—not from any regard of its monetary value, but merely from an altruistic and dilettante point of view. They adopt at least three bases of reckoning—the local time, the Madrid time, and the Western European (by which the trains do not start). All the clocks are at variance with all of them: and the whole system seems solely contrived for the bewilderment of the foreigner, for the habitué impartially ignores the lot.
The people of Oviedo,—and, indeed, all Asturians and Gallegans,—are esteemed an inferior race by your true Castilian. The prejudice is rather puzzling: for “the mountains” are the cradle of the oldest and bluest blood in Spain. But it is of very old standing; for even the Cid Campeador, when administering the oath to Alfonso VI. (who was suspected of complicity in King Sancho’s{125} murder[16]), could devise no more humiliating adjuration than “If you swear falsely, may you be slain by an Oviedan!”
Perhaps the early warriors who sallied forth to achieve the reconquest despised those who remained quietly behind in the mountains. And when in later days royalty and chivalry made their home in the south, the simpler northerners would come to be regarded as boors. Even to this day the Asturian peasant seems to lack something of the formality of the Castilian. He is less punctilious in enquiring “how you have passed the night” of a morning; less prompt with the regular roadside greeting, “May your honour go with God!” The slurring of these little niceties may possibly be sufficient to brand him as a “bounder”; and there is no stigma more hard to obliterate than this.
For all these courteous trifles are the shibboleth of high breeding to a Spaniard, and a terrible stumbling-block to the blunt-spoken Englishman,—so apt to give unwitting offence. The Spanish generals always waited on Wellington to ask how he had slept, even when they knew that he had watched all night in the trenches. If they omitted{126} the ceremony they feared he would deem himself slighted. “On the contrary,” quoth Alava drily, “he will be very much obliged.”