The lights of Bayonne at length gladly broke upon us as the evening darkened, and in a short time we were rattling with horse and bells through the heavy stone gates, and over the moats and drawbridges of the city walls. The old narrow streets, with their tall houses covered with balconies, lattices, and coloured blinds, were a foretaste of those to be seen in Spain. The rows of lighted shops, beneath heavy low arcades built of hewn stone, and supported by stout pillars, brown with age, were all crowded with busy passengers, garbed with sash, velvet breech, and bonnet. The bright cafés—filled with loungers, small politicians, and trim waiters, with their hair mowed to the roots—were shedding on the roadway floods of yellow light.
On we rattled, over roads not paved yesterday, if ever paved at all, amidst bumping and jingling, forced to listen from time to time to periodic fits of shocking language addressed to the smoking horses, gay in coloured trappings, and trotting us merrily along. Now we dived into a narrow alley, black as pitch darkness could make it. Then we twisted out of it so sharply, round a corner, that, had our hair not been carefully oiled, it would have stood on end, and emerged into a wide street full of gas lamps, illuminated windows, and rows of bright green little trees, trimmed so artificially that they had as little resemblance to their natural growing congeners as those in a child's Noah's ark. It was pleasant, after our dreary day's journey, to find ourselves thus hurrying, in the brilliant flare of the night lamps, through a most picturesque old town, over bridges from which we could see in the rapid waters below the twinkling reflection of a hundred lights, along streets in which we passed companies of soldiers marching to the music of drums and bugles, and through busy quays all alive with bustle and loaded with merchandise. In fact,
"The city gates were opened; the market, all alive
With buyers and with sellers, was humming like a hive;
Blithely on brass and timber the craftsman's stroke was ringing;
And blithely o'er her panniers the peasant girl was singing."
And "blithely" we eventually entered the Hotel * * *, and sat down to a remarkably good dinner of fresh sardines, wild boar, paté de foie de canard, and a dish of beccaficoes. "Our bore," the inevitable Cockney across the table, fired off a sickly joke at the expense of those little birds, to the effect that, if we had never yet eaten beccaficoes, we ought-to-learn (ortolan). Now really! Oh! who can minister to the "mind diseased" that produces such monstrosities?
The hotel was a great square house, with a wonderful collection of keys on a board by the entrance door, as if they had been fired there like grape-shot out of a gun. The passages and staircases were liberally supplied by day with sand and saliva, and by night with cockroaches of remarkable size. Hanging on the walls of the salle-à-manger were advertisements of bull-fights to come off in various towns of Spain, and also others of various hotels in different countries. There was one of a boarding-house in Weymouth Street, Portland Place, London, with a picture of the same. Now we do not wish to set up as art-critics, but merely state that we have once or twice in the course of our lives had occasion to find ourselves in that salubrious district, but don't remember noticing any detached house or Italian villa in a park, with palm trees waving over it, and a plantain in full growth. There was another picture of a hotel in Granada, with the Moors walking about the streets and conversing with the waiters at the door, as if Abderrhaman was still residing in Spain.
In the courtyard of our inn a fountain was playing, and a vine formed a large shady arbour for smokers and idlers beneath. There was not much to complain of, and notwithstanding the general smell of garlic, and an odour resembling that of steamboat cabins, with which the bedrooms were perfumed, we slept most comfortably for a short time with calm consciences and clean sheets, gratefully manufacturing a proverb for the occasion, to the effect that fine feathers make fine beds, to say nothing of good housemaids. We even glided into dreams, in which we held conversations with individuals of every possible complexion, dressed in scarlet Scotch bonnets, velveteen jackets, broken out into a nettle-rash of metal buttons, red sashes, breeches, and hose, in Basque, Spanish, French, English, and all sorts of patois, all at once, and with incredible ease, coherence, and velocity. We say we slept most comfortably for a short time, and one must have been very deaf, or stolid, or philosophical,—in a word, insensible to all sorts of disturbance,—to have slept comfortably after 2 a.m. in such a place. For diligence after diligence coming from somewhere or other, and going in the same direction, rolled by every quarter of an hour immediately underneath our windows, accompanied with loud shouts, cracking of whips, and jangling of bells.
Between the quarters of the hours a gentleman and his wife enlightened the entire hotel with a domestic wrangle in one of the rooms in our neighbourhood, and at 5 a.m. some person or persons overhead, probably experimentalising with a cold tub for the first time in their lives, apparently found it impossible to restrain themselves from giving vent to the natural exhilaration produced by the bath in what seemed, by the trampling they made, to be an Indian war-dance. Added to this, there was a clock in our apartment which struck six when it should have struck four, and eight when it should have struck six, thereby becoming a source of much anxiety to the half-dormant mind, torturing it with vague speculations when it should have been at rest.