Spanish Highways and Byways

by Katharine Lee Bates

"Wouldn't you like some roses? They sell them here at this station. There comes a boy now with a nice, big bunch. One peseta! I think that's too dear, don't you?"

I hastened to assent.

"The lady says that's too dear. Seventy-five centimos? No. The lady can't pay that. Sixty centimos? No. The lady can't afford sixty centimos. Fifty centimos? No. The lady says fifty centimos is too much. She will take them at forty centimos. Here's a half peseta. And you must give me back a fat dog."

The boy held back the penny and tried to substitute a cent.

"Oh, sir, please, sir, forty-five centimos! There are two dozen roses here, and all fresh as the dawn. Give me the puppy-dog over."

But the German, who knew how to put even a sharper edge on the inveterate Spanish bargaining, secured for the value of eight cents, instead of twenty, his great bouquet of really beautiful roses, and presented it with as much of a bow as the carriage limits permitted.

"I meant to pay all the time, you know; but one can always make a better trade, in Spain, if it is done in the name of a lady." And he added, with that sudden tact which innate goodness and delicacy give to the most blundering of us mortals, "If you don't like to take them from a stranger for yourself, you will take them as my peace-offering to your country."

I was reminded again of my native land by another fellow-traveller—a Spaniard of the Spaniards, this time, one of the Conservative and Catholic leaders, greeted at the various stations by priests and monks and friars, whose hands he solemnly kissed. This distinguished personage was absorbed in a voluminous type-written manuscript, from which he occasionally read aloud to the band of political confidants who accompanied him. It was an arraignment of the Liberal Party, and, by way of exposing the errors of the Sagasta government, included a merciless résumé of the Spanish naval and military disasters, with elaborate comparisons of the American and Spanish equipments. He was then on his way to join in a consoling pilgrimage to a certain image of Christ, which had been cudgelled by a grief-maddened priest whose dying mother the image had failed to heal.

These surroundings more or less jostled my sixteenth-century dream, but I held to it so stubbornly that, when pyramids of salt began to glimmer like ghosts along the way, and a sweeping curve of lights warned me of our approach to Cadiz, I made a point of seeing as little as possible. It was midnight, but Spanish hours are luckily so late that Don José's friends were still at the height of evening sociability and regaled me with alternate showers of sweetmeats and questions. Finally, after many exclamations of horror at the audacity of the trip, all the feminine hospitality of the household lighted me to a chamber whose walls were hung with pictures of martyrs and agonizing saints. Among these I counted five colored representations of Christ opening his breast to display the bleeding heart.

The next morning I promptly took boat to Puerto de Santa Maria, embarked on the return steamer, and so at last found myself once more on the Silver Road, entering Cadiz harbor from the sea.