The Andaluz is the embodiment of his climate. A child of the sun, of the clear free air, with wealth in his fields and the great ocean smiling all around his coast, where the ships of all nations come to lade and unlade, he yearns for the freedom which strangers hold so carelessly, and is ready to fight and to die for it. So Andalusia is the hotbed of revolution. As the Biscayan is famed for his unyielding nature, the Gallego for his stupidity, so is the Andaluz for his wit. He speaks rapidly and with many gestures, clipping his words—a grave sin against the sonorous Castilian. He is handsome, quick, fiery, with a keen eye for ridicule, but a good nature that can never resist a joke even if it be at his own expense. People say that he derives his comely form and graceful extremities from the Moors, but he would not thank you to tell him so. The Andaluza is worthy of such a partner, if she does not surpass him. If he is a Republican, she is a Carlina, for Don Carlos with her means religion, and religion means everything. Byron has painted her, and very faithfully. His remarks on the state of the country might be written to-day. He moralizes over the barbarity of the bull-fights, too. They are dying out now in exact proportion as man-fights are gaining ground with us. Of the two, we must say we infinitely prefer the bull-fight. It is amusing to hear Englishmen and Americans virtuously indignant on the immorality and barbarism of such an exhibition, as they bury themselves next moment in a three-column description of the latest feat of the fancy, or the glorious contest for hours between two miserable dogs or wretched cocks. We are lovers of fair play, manliness, and good-fellowship. We do things in an honest, straightforward fashion, and the hand that shakes another’s preparatory to the combat quite takes the sting from the blow that maims his fellow-man for life or beats that life out of him. So we look on and applaud and make our bets on the contest, and curse the wretch who has lost his own miserable life and our money.
But we are straying into civilization; let us go back to barbarism and Andalusia. The vineyards are decidedly unpicturesque; the vines low, the soil yellow. But the life at vintage season is
“Full of the warm South,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth.”
The agricultural laborers are very well paid in Spain, getting as much as one dollar a day or even more. The work is terrible; out the whole day under a burning sun, delving and cutting and trenching a dusty soil, with a pick instead of a spade to penetrate below the upper stratum of dust. They are tall wiry fellows, most of them from the mountains, brown as the soil, and sinewy, with dark eyes and crisp, close-cut black hair. A quarter of an hour spent in merely looking on overpowers us; but they seem made for the sun. The food that supports them under such toil is composed chiefly of a single dish called gazpacho, and gazpacho merits special mention. Fill a large bowl with water and vinegar, we do not know the exact proportions, but there is a great deal of vinegar, and, so far as we recollect, oil is added. A quantity of bread is thrown in to soak, and some herbs, with, perhaps, a slight flavor of garlic; and there you have gazpacho, the staple food of these men in the hot months. You eat a small piece of some light meat and a salad before it; a piece of toast fried in oil is not bad; drink a glass of water or two after; light the never-failing cigarette, and you are cool and refreshed. It may not seem a very delicate diet to us; but when the Levante, the hot desert wind laden with the finest of the burning sands, comes choking the atmosphere, and penetrating every crevice with a furnace heat all the day and all the night, burning the blood in the veins till it reaches fever-heat, and leaving you weak and utterly prostrate, “with just strength enough to thank God that breathing is an involuntary action”—as a gentleman aptly described to me the effects of the sirocco, the Italian equivalent—then place before a man in such a state of lassitude a steaming joint of roast beef with the heavy incidentals, and he will turn from it with disgust. At such moments the gazpacho seems the most delicious dish under the sun. The houses and furniture of these laborers are the neatest and cleanest in the world. The same feeling runs through high and low in Spain; their houses are models of freshness and purity. And Jacobo or Perico turns out on the Sunday in linen fine as his master’s, in jacket of velvet with buttons or bells of gold, a crimson scarf round his waist, and patent-leather shoes shining on his feet. He can joke and chat with his master with an easy freedom that never passes beyond the bounds of respect and never sinks into servility. As you pass him on the road alone or with any number of his companions, they all lift their sombreros with an inborn grace, and a genial buenos dias or buenas tardes, señor. But the new order is trying, and with some success, to change all that; though a stranger still meets in Spain with that rare yet most Christian thing, unbought courtesy.
The Gallego is the very opposite of the Andaluz—a rude, simple mountaineer, he is the hewer of wood and drawer of water to his countrymen. He is honest and open as the day, with a childlike affection for his master, and is particularly happy at a blunder. Rare are the stories told in Andalusia of the Gallegos. We give two, rather as indicating the estimation in which they are held than as happy specimens of the Andalusian broma.
When the post was first introduced into Spain, the postmaster of a small town in the north was astonished, one day, by a Gallego bursting in on him with the query, delivered in stentorian tones:
“Is there a letter here for me from my father?”
“I do not know, sir; who is your father?”
This was too much for the Gallego; the idea of anybody in this world being unacquainted with his parent was so overpowering that, not being able to restrain his feelings, he rushed from the spot, and was not heard of for some time afterwards. Meanwhile, a letter arrived directed in a style of calligraphy that might have done credit to Mr. Weller, Senior, addressed