We saw the Zingari of Andalusia living in caves scooped from the living rock. A dance was arranged for us; four girls and one man trod strange and beautiful measures. The best dancer of the five, whose name is Incarnacion, is partly Spanish. When the performance was half over, each of the women kissed me on the cheek and gave a little mock embrace to the gentlemen of our party. As they were well scrubbed and freshly dressed, I enjoyed the pretty ceremony. We were offered wine, which we declined and they drank.
Andalusia was inhabited by the Moors for seven hundred and seventy-seven years before the Spaniards drove them out! Poor dears, how sorry I am they ever left it. Many of them took with them the massive iron doorkeys of their houses, believing that they would surely return some day to the land their industry had made fruitful, their art made beautiful. To-day in some ancient houses of Morocco these keys of the lost homes of Granada and Andalusia still hang upon the wall!
Andalusia is now chiefly important to the rest of the world as the treasure house of their scattered buildings, each one a gem, while the Moors, since they went back to Morocco, do not seem to have done much for themselves or for anybody else. Was it pleasant, do you think, to stand in the room of the Alhambra where Washington Irving lived, and to pick a leaf from the tree that bore his favorite oranges, also to eat an orange from the same? Our guide, Antonia Jimenez, was the great, great nephew of his guide. Irving’s “Alhambra” is a classic; it gives the feeling of the place wonderfully.
How do you suppose it felt to be in Seville and to have Don Antonio Sucillio announced and go out with this fascinating Spaniard and partake of breakfast in a summer house lost in orange trees, to have a hidden singer caroling fierce war ballads and passionate love songs and a guitarist do the things with his instrument that only a Spaniard can do? Oh, week of romance and joy stolen from the workaday winter! A never-failing fount of happy memory. Even the beggars, the sturdiest of their breed in all the world, have a charm. Spain! Spain! It has taken the flavor out of everything else. I must go back if only for Madrid, where only one sees Velasquez. At Seville one gains a good idea of Murillo, who was a native of that charming city of roses. The finest specimens are
| LAURA E. RICHARDS From a photograph by Reynolds | FLORENCE HOWE HALL From a photograph by Langhorne |
in the damp dreadful old gallery where the pictures are suffering horribly. There is the divine San Antonio with the child Christ appearing to him, and a very fine Conception. The week in Spain was comparable to nothing but an Arabian Nights’ tale; the dazzle of the Alhambra is still in my eyes!