“We did not expect to find such a fine hotel in Spain,” I said to the capable English manageress.
“Ah, well! we hardly count this as Spain, you know!” she answered, with a fine insular contempt for all things “foreign.”
“She’s right!” cried Patsy. “Por Dios. Shall we never get out of England?” and willy-nilly he carried us off to lunch at Don Jaime’s fonda, in the old part of the town.
The Don was waiting for us on a bench outside the inn door, smoking his inevitable cigarette, in the soft spring air. He looked a little bleary about the eyes, as if he had not had enough sleep.
“Don Jaime is up early to-day for our sake,” Patsy explained; “as he goes to bed at four in the morning, he does not usually appear before two in the afternoon.”
“The morning is a disease,” said the Don. “I find it best not to go out until the day is well aired.”
“Please observe,” Patsy interrupted, “that this place has a proper odor of garlic; at last we are out of the smell of English roast beef!”
The Don sighed. “Nevertheless, I comfortably recall the roast beef we had at school in Stoneyhurst,” he said; “it was rare, with plenty good, red gravy.”
“That was all right in England; we’re in Andalusia now. Let’s begin with an olla, then a dish of rice, saffron, pimientos, and little birds,—and wine from that fattest wineskin. I counted ten of them outside in the road, leaning jovially together against the wall of the fonda.”
When he got his wine from the “fattest wineskin”—it tasted a little of the “leather botelle”—Patsy raised his glass.