Another relic of by-gone times is the cap universally worn in this region by the longshoremen, the fishers, and the male portion of the lower orders generally; for it is nothing less than the old Phrygian liberty cap, imported hither by the Paul Pry Phœnicians ages ago. Woven in a single piece, it appears at first sight to be a long, soft, commodious bag, tinted with vermilion or violet or brown as the case may be. Into the aperture the native inserts his head and then pulls the rest of the flapping contrivance down as far as he pleases, letting the end float loose in the wind, or more commonly bringing it round to the front, curling it over and tucking it in upon itself in such a way as to make an overhanging protection for the eyes, and to give the whole a look that recalls the top of an Oxford student's cap. With this head-gear, and wearing sandals made of fine hempen cord tied by long black tapes, the men presented a free, half barbarous and sufficiently picturesque appearance. I don't know how long we might have continued to roam the streets of Barcelona, listening to the uncouth patois of the locality, in which French and Spanish words are so outlandishly mingled, nor how long we should have clung to the remnants of architecture and history that jutted seductively above the surface of the modern here and there, if it had not been that cold necessity limited our time and propelled us relentlessly northward. Even now I find that my pen is reluctant to leave the tracing of those vanished scenes, and hesitates to write the last word as much as if it were an enchanter's wand, instead of a plain, business-like little instrument.
With its usual fatuity the railroad obliged us to start so early that at the first dusky gray streak of dawn we were dismally taking our coffee in the patio of the hotel. The dueño was sleeping by sections on two hard chairs, considerately screened from us by a clump of orange shrubs, and murmuring now and then some direction to the half-invisible waiter floating about in a dark arcade; but he roused himself, and woke up wholly for a minute or two while perpetrating a final extortion. Otherwise the silence was profound. It was the silence of the past, the unseen current of oblivion that sets in and begins to eddy round the facts of to-day, in such a country, the moment human activity is suspended or the reality of the present is at all dimmed. Silence here leads at once to retrospection; differing in this from the mute solitude of American places, which somehow always tingles with anticipation. And the dueño, in overcharging us, became only the type of a long line of historic plunderers that have infested the Peninsula from the date of the Roman rule down to the incursion of Napoleon and the most recent period. His little game was invested with all the dignity of history and tradition. The sickly light of day above the court struggled feebly and dividedly with the waning yellow of the candle-flame on our table.
"After all," said Velveteen, "I'm glad to be going, for this is no longer Spain."
And yet, at the instant of leaving, we discovered that it was indeed Spain, and a pang of regret followed those words.
As we issued from the hotel we saw, crossing the street in the increased dawn-light, and striding toward the dépot, the two Civil Guards. It looked as if we should be captured on the very threshold of liberty. The thought lent wings to our haste.... Some hours afterward, when we were passing through the tunnels of the Pyrenees, we congratulated ourselves on our escape; and, indeed, as we looked back to the mountain-wall from France, we could fancy we saw two specks on the summit which might have been our pursuers. They were too late! Their own excess of mystery had baffled them. They had dogged us every league of the way, and yet we had traversed Spain without being detected as—what? I really don't know, but I'm sure those Civil Guards must. If not, their military glare, their guns, and their secrecy are the merest mockeries.
How softly the waves broke along the Mediterranean sands that morning, close to the rails over which we were flying! Green and white, or violet, and shimmered over by the crimson splendor of the illumined East, they surged one after another upon the golden shore and spent themselves like wasted treasure. There was something mournful in their movement—something very sad in the presence of this beauty which I was never to see again. Did I not hear mingled with the sparkling flash and murmur of those waves a long-drawn "A-a-ay!"—the most pathetic of Spanish syllables, which had thrown its shadow across the fervid little songs heard so often by the way?
"Bird, little bird that wheelest
Through God's fair worlds in the sky"—
the strain came back again, with the memory of a low-tuned guitar; and the waves went on, arriving and departing; and the land of our pilgrimage steadily receded. The waves are breaking yet on that windless coast; but, for us, Spain—brilliant, tawny, bright-vestured Spain, with all its ruins and poetry, its desolation and beauty and gaudy semi-barbarism—has been rapt away once more into the atmosphere of distance and of dreams!
