A group of handsome girls were gathered round a huge cauldron outside a neat booth, from which floated a delicious odor of fried cakes.
“Who’s hungry?”
“Everybody!”
“Soledad!” A tall girl in a clean, print dress, a scarlet shawl pinned across her shoulders, a geranium in her coarse black hair, answered Pemberton’s call.
“Serve buñuelos for all.”
I asked Pemberton why he had used the second person instead of the third, in speaking to Soledad—what a name! It means solitude.
“It is the custom. The poorest Spaniard addresses the richest gypsy as ‘thou,’ on the ground that the Gitano is the inferior race. These people are buñoleras; they travel all over Spain from fair to fair, frying these buñuelos, a sort of sublimated fritter, their specialty. No one else has the art. I know this family; the women are a good sort; the men,—lazy rascals! Last summer they stole two of my sheep; lassooed them, lifted them clean out of the fold. I traced them to their camp. What do you suppose I found? Instead of my white sheep, two black sheep; they had the stuff all ready, and clapped the creatures in; by the time I got there they were already dyed.”
An elderly woman, vigorous, bronzed, with the bold, unwinking eyes of the Romany, stood beside the cauldron making mysterious passes with a long spoon. Soledad waited by her side with a hot dish, and in a twinkling a pile of golden bubbles was before us, light, dry, exquisite as only fritters fried in pure olive oil can be.
“Fried air, with a trifle of pastry around it,