Bands of musical beggars assailed us. Most of the mendicants were blind. One group, a veritable orchestra, travelled from café to café clinging to the edges of a bass viol which the one seeing member, the money collector, dragged the way it should go, by the peg-head. There was an old guitarist who played and made queer noises through a small gazoo. Another orchestra of three, guitar, laud and bandurria, the latter instrument a small cousin of the laud, and in this case played beautifully by a blind boy of about nineteen years. There were other beggars too, but the devil of cheap European music had entered into them all. Not one played their own native Spanish music. I suppose nobody would pay to hear it played.
At the end of the palm avenue an artist had set up an easel on a raised dais. His work was illuminated by a strong acetylene gas lamp. The canvas was painted bright sparrow's egg blue and surrounded by a frame of staring gilt.
On the blue canvas he was painting an imaginary landscape, the blue serving as sky and for the waters of a still lake. A drab woman was threading her way to and fro through the crowd which surrounded him, crying out: "The numbers, the numbers. Who would like to win a magnificent picture, framed complete for ten chances a penny?"
Another crowd surrounded a buck nigger who, displaying his magnificent and gleaming teeth, was crying out the virtues of his dentifrice.
A third crowd listened to a quack doctor who, backed by a large picture depicting the jungle, was selling a specific called "African Tonic." The tonic, he said, was derived from essences extracted at enormous expense from the tiger, the elephant, the monkey, and from I know not what else. From time to time he rested his voice by turning on a squeaky gramophone.
Tired from our journey we went to bed betimes.
We got up early. In the waggons, which were lined up in the big courtyard, the families which had slept in them were making their toilet. In the entrada, the old man of the inn, aided by the stable boy, was packing away the hammock beds slung from trestles, on which slept those travellers who, having no waggon, did not wish to pay the expense of a bedroom.
We had noted small café stalls near to the market, so, in order to see some more of Alicante life, we took our breakfast there rather than in the fonda. The café stalls were wooden box-like kiosks, and they spread wicker chairs and tables over the open street, and soldiers and workmen were sitting sipping their morning refreshment. Beneath the shelter of the kiosk a lad was making the day's supply of ice cream. The cream is frozen by the amount of heat absorbed from it by the freezing mixture. One might also say that the amount of refreshment to be derived from ice cream seems proportionate to the amount of energy absorbed from the lad who manufactures it: it appeared a fatiguing business. Crowds of people on the way to market passed us, and to where we sat came the cries of the market salesmen. We were not stared at here as we had been in Murcia. Strangers were evidently more common.