He never left me without asking, "Is there anything wanting still?"
The waiters and chamber-maids ate their meals at little tables in the hall, and whenever I passed them, if they were eating, they made a gracious gesture toward their pillau of rice. "Would your grace like to eat?"
This offer to share their food with any one who goes by is a simple and kindly inheritance from the East; but it becomes a little embarrassing, and I longed for a pair of back stairs to slink away by, without having to decline their hospitality every time I went out.
To go out in the middle of the day was like looking into the sun itself. Everybody stayed in-doors behind thick curtains of matting, and dozed or dripped away the time in idle perspiration; but hearing unaccountable blasts of orchestral music during this forced retirement, I inquired, and found them to proceed from the rehearsal of a Madrid opera company then in Alicante. Our attendant at table proved to be a duplex character—a serving-man by day and a fourteenth lord in the chorus by night, with black and yellow stockings, and a number of gestures indicating astonishment, indignation, or, in fact, anything that the emergency required. We had the pleasure of seeing him on the stage that very evening, and of listening to an extravagant performance of "La Favorita," between two acts of which an usher came in and collected the tickets of the whole audience. The theatre was remarkably spacious for a town of thirty thousand inhabitants; but Alicante is a favorite winter resort, and even maintains a "Gallistic Circus;" that is, a place for cock-fights.
The Garden of Alicante is a luscious spot, hidden away some two or three miles from the town, and owned by the Marques de Venalua, a young man of large wealth, who spends all his time at Alicante, and is a public benefactor, having introduced water in pipes at his own expense. The carriage and consumption of water, indeed, seemed to be the chief business of the population. They have a system of fountains for distributing sea-water from which the salt has been extracted, and women and children are kept going to these with huge jars, to satisfy the local thirst. To be born thirsty, live thirsty, and die so, is a privilege enjoyable only in countries like Southern Spain. One can form there, too, a vivid idea of the desert, from the delight with which he hails the green Huerta, or garden. The road and fields on the way thither were like a waste of cinders and ashes. The almond and fig trees, the pomegranates and algarrobas beside the way, were coated with dust that lay upon them like thin snow; and the almond-nuts, where they hung in sight, resembled plaster casts, so pervasive was the white deposit. But all at once we mounted a low rise, and the wide stretch of verdant plantations lay before us, thick-foliaged, cool, sweet, and refreshing, with villas embowered among the oranges and palms, a screen of dim mountains beyond, and the silent blue sea brimming the horizon on the right. It was a spectacle delicious as sleep to tired eyes; it brought a cry of pleasure to my lips and grateful life to the heart.
But this spot, lovely as it is, becomes insignificant beside the glorious Huerta of Valencia, stretching for more than thirty miles from the olive-clad hills around Jativa to that city, which is the pleasantest in Mediterranean Spain, and the most characteristic of all, after Toledo, Granada, and Sevilla. There one travels through an unbroken tract of superb cultivation—a garden in exact literalness, yet a territory in size.
