Our rest that night was luxurious. The beds were soft, the blankets light and downy. We slept until the hour when a man promenaded the town blowing blasts on a seashell to call the people to their work.
Before we had left our rooms ponderous steps resounded in the passage outside our doors. It was the proprietor of the diligence, brother to the host of the Café Mangol, come in person to ask at what time we would require a carriage for our visit to the caves.
Having promised to be ready an hour later, we descended to the dining-room, where, after we had drunk our glasses of coffee, the señora insisted on refilling them: an attention without precedent in our experience of Spanish hostelries.
Breakfast over, we sallied out in quest of provisions for our little expedition, a somewhat difficult matter, for the shops at Artá are even more independent of signs than those of the other Balearic towns.
A little questioning revealed a quite unexpected house to be a baker's. The apartment next to the street was fitted up with a counter; but its window was closely shuttered, its shelves empty. To all appearance the entire business of the establishment was carried on in the bakehouse at the back, where, in full view of a pile of egg-shells and other evidences that proclaimed the genuineness of the ingredients employed, we bought little square sponge-cakes hot from the oven.
Boldly entering another shop, which we knew to be a greengrocer's by the orange-hued gourd and basin of parsley on the doorstep, we found it half shop, half weaver's workroom. In one part the mistress and her daughter sold vegetables, boots, and many other requirements of both outer and inner man. In the other the portly father wrought at his hand-loom, weaving the strong dark-blue cotton material so much in use locally.
Having bought a supply of sweet little mandarin oranges at twopence a dozen—just half the Palma price—we returned to the fonda to find the carriage, with Canet and the two horses that had made such light work of the diligence, waiting in readiness to take us to the caves.
