Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

And is it to this those arrogant Spanish boasts, which rang like trumpets up and down the Guadalquivír, have come at last!

We were in the heart of a perfect sapphire day. The river, often turbulent and unruly, was on this April afternoon, the sailors said, buen muchacho, a good boy. The boat appeared to navigate herself. The captain nodded on his lofty perch, and the engineer was curled up in his own tiny hatchway, trying to read a newspaper, which the fresh breeze blew into horns and balloons. The rough cabin bunks were full of sleeping forms, and the leather wine-bottles, flung down carelessly in the stern, had cuddled each to each in cozy shapes, and seemed to be sleeping, too. The two soldiers, who had been gambling with coppers over innumerable games of dominos, were listening grimly to the oratory of the commercial traveller.

"No fighting for me!" this hero was declaiming. "In strenuous times like these a man ought to cherish his life for the sake of his country. Spain needs her sons right here at home. It is sweet, as the poet says, to die for the patria, but to live for the patria is, in my opinion, just as glorious."

"And more comfortable," grunted one of the soldiers, while the other gave a hitch to those red infantry trousers which look as if they had been wading in blood, and walked forward to view from the bows the little white port of Bonanza.

As the boat went no farther, I had to stain my silver route by a prosaic parenthesis of land. It was some comfort to remember that Magellan waited here for that expedition from Seville which was the first to sail around the globe. I think I travelled the three miles from Bonanza, Good Weather, to San Lúcar de Barrameda in Magellan's own carriage. It was certainly old enough. As I sat on a tipsy chair in the middle of a rude wagon frame mounted on two shrieking wooden wheels, and hooded with broken arches of bamboo, from which flapped shreds of russet oilcloth, I entered into poignant sympathy with Magellan's ups and downs of hope and fear. The jolting was such a torture that, to divert my attention, I questioned the driver as to the uses of this and that appliance in his rickety ark.

"And what are those ropes for, there in the corner?" was my final query.

"Those are to tie the coffins down when I have a fare for the cemetery," he replied, cracking his whip over the incredibly lean mule that was sulkily jerking us along.

"Please let me get out and walk," I entreated. "You may keep the valise and show me the way to the inn, and I can go quite as fast as that mule."

"Now, don't!" he begged, with even intenser pathos. "Strangers always want to walk before they get to the inn, and then the people laugh at me. I know my carriage isn't very handsome, but it's the only one in Bonanza. Just do me the favor to keep your seat a little longer."

I had been lurched out of it only a minute before, but I could not refuse to sacrifice mere bodily ease to the pride of Spanish spirit.