Among the tempting wares of Seville are Albacete knives, with gorgeous handles of inlaid ebony, tortoise, or ivory. The peasant women of Andalusia so resent the charge of carrying these knives in their garters that the Seville gamin dodges offence by asking them in an unnecessarily loud voice if they carry garters in their knives. The irascible dames do not stand upon fine points of rhetoric, however, and when the small boy has delivered his shot, he does well to take to his heels. We once saw one of these sturdy women, while a line of soldiers, bristling with steel, was holding a street, seize a gallant son of Mars by the shoulder and swing him, amid the laughter of his comrades, out of her path as if he were a cabbage. Nobody knew how to stop her, and she trudged serenely on, her broad back to those helpless bayonets, down the forbidden way.
The beggars of Seville are gentler than those of Ronda and Granada, but hardly less numerous. Mendicant figures are thick as Guadalquivír mosquitoes in my memory of Andalusia. Some of those pitiful children will haunt me till I die. There was a forlorn urchin, with filmy, frightful eyes, to be seen in all weathers crouching on one side of the road leading up to the Alhambra, so dull and dreary a little fellow that he hardly grasped the coppers when they were thrust into his weakly groping hands, and hardly stayed his monotonous formula of entreaty for his other monotonous formula of thanks. There was an idiot child in Seville—a mere lump of deformity—that would rush out upon the startled stranger with an inarticulate, fierce little yell, clutching at charity with a tiny, twisted claw. He seemed the very incarnation of childish woe and wrong. Almost every hand dived into pocket for him, and he was probably worth far more to his proprietors than his rival on the street, a crafty little girl, with the most lustrous eyes that painter ever dreamed. They were not blue nor gray, but a living light in which both those colors had been melted.
The economists, who say so firmly that "nothing should ever be given to mendicant children," can hardly have had the experience of seeing Murillo's own cherubs, their wings hidden under the dirt, fluttering about the car windows at Andalusian stations. I have it still on my conscience that I occasionally gave away my comrade's share of our luncheon as well as my own. She was too young and too polite to reproach me, but too hungry to be comforted by the assurance that I reproached myself. Sometimes a foreign traveller, very sure of his Spanish, would attempt remonstrance with these small nuisances. I remember one kindly Teuton in particular. Commerce had claimed him for its own, but the predestined German professor shone out of his mild blue eyes. A ragamuffin had mounted the car steps to beg at the window, and Mein Herr delivered him such a lecture that the youngster clung to his perch, fascinated with astonishment at the novel doctrine, until the train was in alarmingly swift motion.
The Alhambra. Hall of Justice
"This is a very bad habit of thine. I told thee so a month ago."
"Me, sir?"
"Thee, boy. When I passed over this road last, thou wert begging at the windows, to my shame if not to thine. Tut, tut! Go thy ways. Look for work, work, work."
"Work, sir?"