The following one has something of the odd imagery and clever inconsequence of our negro improvisations:
"As I was gathering pine-cones
In the sweet pine woods of love,
My heart was cracked by a splinter
That flew from the tree above.
I'm dead: pray for me, sweethearts!"
There was one evening in Granada when we sat in a company of some two dozen people, and one after another of the ladies took her turn in singing to the guitar of a little girl, a musical prodigy. But they were all outdone by Cándida, the brisk, naïve, handsome serving-girl, who was invited in, but preferred to stand outside the grated window, near the lemon-trees and pomegranates, looking in, with a flower in her hair, and pouring into the room her warm contralto—that voice so common among Spanish peasant-women—which seemed to have absorbed the clear dark of Andalusian nights when the stars glitter like lance-points aimed at the earth. Through the twanging of the strings we could hear the rush of water that gurgles all about the Alhambra; and, just above the trees that stirred in the perfumed air without, we knew the unsentinelled walls of the ancient fortress were frowning. The most elaborate piece was one meant to accompany a dance called the Zapateado, or "kick-dance." It begins:
"Tie me, with my fiery charger,
To your window's iron lattice.
Though he break loose, my fiery charger,
Me he cannot tear away;"
and then passes into rhyme:
"Much I ask of San Francisco,
Much St. Thomas I implore;
But of thee, my little brown girl,
Ah, of thee I ask much more!"
The singing went on:
"In Triana there are rogues,
And there are stars in heaven.
Four and one rods away
There lives, there lives a woman.
Flowers there are in gardens,
And beautiful girls in Sevilla."
Nevertheless, we had been glad to leave Sevilla, especially since during our stay an epidemic was in progress, graphically called "the minute," from its supposed characteristic of finishing off a victim ready for the undertaker in exactly sixty seconds after attacking him.
The inhabitants of Granada likewise seemed to be a good deal occupied in burying themselves—a habit which became confirmed, no doubt, during the wars and insurrections of their ancestors, and is aided to-day by bad sanitary arrangements. We saw a dead man being carried in the old Moorish way, with his forehead bared to the sky, a green wreath on his head, his cold hands emerging from the shroud in their last prayer-clasp, and quite indifferent to the pitiless sun that beat down on them. But, perched as we were on the Alhambra Hill, high above the baking city, such spectacles were transient specks in the world of fascination that infolded us.