DAGONET ABROAD

DAGONET ABROAD

BY
GEORGE R. SIMS
AUTHOR OF
‘MARY JANE’S MEMOIRS,’ ‘THE RING O’ BELLS,’ ETC.

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895
TO
COUNT ALBERT EDWARD VON ARMFELT
THE CONSTANT COMPANION OF
DAGONET ABROAD
THESE PAGES ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
BY HIS FRIEND
GEO. R. SIMS

PREFACE

If ‘Dagonet Abroad’ is found to be mainly a record of personal adventure, my excuse must be that I have always endeavoured to attend to my own business and leave other people’s alone. I have described the cities and peoples of Europe entirely from my own personal observation. In no instance have I described a country without visiting it. I trust that this admission will not in any way injure my reputation as a traveller, or as a journalist.

GEO. R. SIMS.

London,
September 1, 1895.

CONTENTS

DAGONET ABROAD

CHAPTER I.
IN BORDEAUX.

I am in Bordeaux in February, and in a hotel; which hotel I am not quite sure. Over the top of the front door it is called ‘Hôtel de la Paix,’ on the left side of the door it is called ‘Hôtel des Princes,’ on the right side of the door it is called ‘Hôtel de Paris.’ It is three single hotels rolled into one; but its variety of nomenclature is slightly confusing. It is nice to be in so many hotels all at once, but I hope they won’t all send me in a separate bill. The key to the enigma is this: Many hotels in Bordeaux have failed, or given up business. The landlord of my hotel has bought the goodwill of each, and stuck its title up over his own front door.

It is early in the morning and bitterly cold when I arrive, but as the day advances it gets aired. The sun comes out in the heavens and slowly gathers strength. By noon the streets are bathed in a warm glow. Bordeaux has changed from the frozen North to the sunny South. It is no longer Siberian; it is Indian. The pavements that were frozen with the cold in the early morning are now baking with the heat. I fling off my ulster, and I light a cigarette and stroll forth, airily clad, to bask and revel in the golden sunlight.

At the corner of the street I come upon a great crowd dressed in black. They are waiting for a funeral. Presently a modest little open hearse draws up. It is drawn by two horses covered from head to tail in rusty black clothing. Two men in faded bottle-green coats jump off, and go into a house. Presently they return with a poor, cheap, common coffin. They place it on the hearse, and throw a faded, rusty-looking pall over it. Then one of the men returns to the house, and comes back with a big wreath of yellow immortelles. On this is executed in black beads the legend, ‘To Raoul Laval; from his friends of the Bureau.’

I mix with the crowd. I inquire who was this Raoul Laval who is starting on his journey to the great Terminus. ‘An employé, monsieur, in the great shop yonder,’ is the answer. ‘So this is the funeral of a little clerk in a big shop,’ I say to myself. ‘Why, then, this big crowd?’ The hearse starts. Then, to my astonishment, I behold this great crowd form behind the hearse—old men and women, young men and maidens, two and two, until the line of procession reaches as far as the eye can see. The hearse is a black dot far away, and still the mourners fall in and follow the little clerk to his grave. There are four gentlemen who hold the tasselled cords of the pall. These are the proprietors of the great emporium. Then come the relatives—Raoul’s mother and his wife—then all the gentlemen in the office, then the gentlemen behind the counter and the smart shopgirls and the humble little workgirls, the porters and the packers, and the needlewomen, and the coachmen who drive out the carts, and the boys who deliver the parcels. Every living soul, great and small, rich and poor, all who earn their daily bread in that big drapery house where Raoul Laval was a humble clerk, have turned out to-day to do him honour and to see him home.

Slowly the long line of mourners (I count 760) passes on its way up the broad street until it is out of sight. I am left alone looking after it. Not quite alone, for an old man, who leans upon a stick and is bent with age, stands beside me, and shades his time-dulled eyes from the fierce sun, and peers through the distance to get the last glimpse of the fast-vanishing cortége. ‘It is an honour to him, poor fellow!’ I say to the patriarch, as we turn away together; ‘a great honour for the whole firm to have followed him like this.’ ‘Yes, monsieur,’ he answers, ‘it is an honour; but he deserves it. He has been a faithful servant to the firm for twenty years, and everybody respected him. We shall all miss him now he is gone.’ ‘Ah! you are of the firm, too?’ ‘Yes, sir; I am the concierge. Poor Monsieur Raoul! Always a kind word for everybody, he had; and always at his post, monsieur—always at his post. The firm has lost a brave fellow—God rest his soul!’

Our ways divided; the old concierge went back to the shop, and I strolled on to the busy quay, teeming with colour and movement and life. But though I looked on the great river with its forest of masts, and listened to the babble of the thousand labourers on the quay as they loaded and unloaded the mighty ships, my thoughts were with the little clerk of the big drapery shop who was having so grand a funeral.

Yes, a grand funeral. The horses were broken-kneed, the coffin was cheap and common, the pall was threadbare and faded; but that great crowd of genuine mourners was something that a monarch might have envied. For every man and woman, every boy and girl in that long line of witnesses to his worth, loved and respected the man. Happy Raoul Laval! Lucky little clerk to have managed your life so well! How many of us whose names are known to fame—how many of us who fret and fume, and wear our hearts out in the battle for renown—would fall back into the ranks, and toil on quietly as you did to gain such love and respect and sympathy when our work is done, and we are put to bed to rest through the long dark night that must be passed ere we awaken to that brighter day which no living eyes may see!

Bordeaux is big and clean, and strikes one as a healthy town. The streets are wide and well kept, and parks and open spaces are plentiful. The people of Bordeaux have a healthy, happy, prosperous look. They walk briskly, instead of slouching about like the people of Marseilles. In fact, Bordeaux is the exact opposite of Marseilles. If you particularly wanted to see what cholera was like, and had to pick out a town where there was a fine chance of getting it, you couldn’t do better than try Marseilles. If you wanted to escape from the epidemic, and get to a town where there was the least probability of its following you, you couldn’t do better than settle in Bordeaux. I can’t put the difference between the two towns in a more striking way than that.

The French equivalent of ‘carrying coals to Newcastle’ is ‘carrying wine to Bordeaux.’ You haven’t been in Bordeaux five minutes before the presence of an enormous wine trade makes itself felt. Wine stares at you and confronts you everywhere. The wine lists in the hotels are huge volumes. Hundreds of varieties of wines, red and white, are elaborately set out. First you have the names of the ‘cru’s,’ then the year, the price, the proprietors, and the place where the wine was bottled. You can read down a whole page of red wines, the cheapest of which is 25 francs a bottle, and the dearest 100 francs. These wine lists, which are handed to you in every hotel and restaurant, are magnificently bound in morocco and lettered in gold, and it is set forth that the ‘cellars’ from which you are drinking belong to a house founded so many years after the Flood, and that it has ‘a speciality for the grand wines of Bordeaux, bottled at the châteaux, with the mark of their authentic origin on the corks, capsules, and labels.’

If ever one drinks genuine ‘Bordeaux,’ it ought to be at Bordeaux. At Yarmouth one does not suspect the freshness of the bloater; in Devonshire one blindly accepts the cream; at Banbury nothing can shake one’s faith in the cake; and at Whitstable one does not say to the waiter at one’s hotel, as he hands you the oysters, ‘Waiter, are these really natives?’ At Bordeaux I was prepared to gulp down even the vin ordinaire with the sublime faith of a Christian martyr; but, lounging on the great quays of Bordeaux, my faith sustained a shock from which it will never recover, and this is how it happened:

I am of a curious and inquiring turn of mind. When I saw great ships being unloaded, and casks of wine being piled high upon the quays, I said to my companion, ‘Albert Edward, mon ami’ (Albert Edward are the Christian names of my travelling companion), ‘tell me is not this strange? Behold, here are vessels which are actually carrying wine to Bordeaux! Go and gather information.’ My companion departed, and presently returned armed—nay, actually bristling—with facts.

The wine which we saw was wine imported from Spain. Enormous quantities of common Spanish wines are brought periodically from Spain to Bordeaux, and are there mixed with the ‘wines of the country.’ This discovery was a great blow to me; but I had a still greater blow when I found tremendous cargoes of all sorts of chemicals being unloaded, and I learnt that these also were imported for the purpose of manufacturing Bordeaux wines. Of course, the high-priced old wines are above suspicion; but I don’t think I shall ever recover my faith in the vin ordinaire, after seeing that tremendous importation of Spanish wines and chemicals.

The fact is that Bordeaux has for a long time past been unable to meet the tremendous demands for its wines. The phylloxera has further increased the difficulty by ravaging the vineyards. So Nature having failed, Art steps in to supply the deficiency.

For the terrible spread of the phylloxera the growers were probably themselves originally to blame. They had been interfering with nature. The farmers in some countries have come to grief again and again from the same cause. Their crops have been destroyed by insects because they (the farmers) slaughtered all the small birds who would have kept the insects down. Everything in nature has its uses, and is meant to keep things in proportion. The world only prospers so long as we eat one another. Directly we upset the equilibrium of nature, we must pay the penalty. Half the diseases and epidemics which ravage the world are caused by the selfishness of man in endeavouring to work that willing horse, Nature, to death.

My hotel is exactly opposite the Grand Theatre of Bordeaux. The theatre is a magnificent building, and worthy of any capital. It stands alone in the centre of an immense square. This theatre was in 1871 the seat of the French Government, and here the Chamber of Deputies sat. It is very nice to live opposite a grand theatre, because you can pop across the road after dinner, and there you are, don’t you know.

While I was in Bordeaux a grand opera company had possession of the theatre, and it was for this reason that I presently found out that there are also disadvantages in living in a hotel opposite a grand theatre. I had just settled down to my work, when I was startled by female shrieks in the next room to me. I imagined that a murder was being committed, and I rushed to the keyhole. But the shrieks suddenly became melodious, and then merged into shakes and cadenzas and trills, and general vocal gymnastics of the high Italian style. It was the prima donna of the opera company practising for the evening. She practised all the morning and all the afternoon, and it was past seven in the evening before she left off.

It was very interesting at first to hear all those lovely top notes gratis, but when a lady in the room on the other side of me commenced the same diversion in a rich contralto, and the gentleman in a room on the other side of my corridor began to sing in a basso profundo, and a gentleman up above me, who was the leading violinist, began tuning his fiddle, and a gentleman somewhere else in the hotel practised a solo on the trombone, being engaged for a private party after the opera, I began to gather together my writing materials, and rang the bell for the waiter, and inquired if he could direct me to a hotel, a little way out of town, at which the members of an opera company were not likely to put up.

The soprano lady in the next room to me was Mdlle. Isaak, and she travelled with a nice old mama and a dear old papa. Mama and papa accompanied her everywhere, and when they were in their own room they sat and applauded her shakes and runs vigorously with their feet and their hands. They all three came down and dined opposite me in the restaurant, and even between the courses Mdlle. Isaak hummed a little aria from the opera, and papa kept time with his fork on his wine-glass.

I had grand opera all day, and long after midnight I was suddenly aroused from my slumber by a terrific operatic duet in the next room. The tenor had returned to supper with the soprano family, and he and the lady were obliging mamma and papa with the duet they were going to sing together on the morrow. When they had finished I rose stealthily, and crept to the keyhole and hissed through it like a hundred discontented first-nighters. I would have paid my hotel bill twice over to have seen the faces of mamma and papa when that unwelcome sound burst upon their startled ears.

I have told you what beautiful sunshine we had at Bordeaux, and how nice and warm it was in the daytime. As long as the sun kept out it was lovely; but oh, when the sun went down! They gave me a beautiful, large, lofty room at the hotel, with doors and windows all over it. After dinner I went up to it to try and write, and then I found that Siberia had come again. I put great logs of wood upon the fire, and blew them with the bellows till the flames roared up the chimney; but still I shivered in the icy blasts that blew through every crevice. I put on my ulster, I dragged the blankets from the bed, I ran races round the room, and practised the Indian clubs with a heavy portmanteau in each hand; but still I felt my blood congealing, and the horrors of the early morning came back again. In this dilemma my companion’s Soudan experiences stood us in good stead. (He was with Gordon in the expedition of ’76-’77.) He took our walking-sticks and umbrellas, and with these and the blankets and the rugs he rigged up a nice, comfortable tent in front of the fire. Sitting in this tent in our big room we at last got warm, and my fingers were able to hold a pen.

People who have not travelled find it difficult to believe how cold it can be at night in places which are hot during the day. Houses in these places are arranged to keep out the warmth, and in consequence they let in the cold. A Russian gentleman who was shivering in Rome said to me one evening: ‘Ah, in my country we see the cold; in Italy we feel it.’ It is a fact that in a really cold country you can always keep yourself warm, while in a warm country you find it extremely difficult to prevent yourself feeling cold.

I think we saw everything in Bordeaux except the Zoological Gardens, and we didn’t see these for a reason. At the hotel they gave me a local guide-book, which duly set forth the wonders of the town. A whole page was devoted to the Zoological Gardens. Here, the book informed the traveller, were to be seen lions and tigers and elephants, all sorts of dogs and monkeys and serpents and rare birds. Moreover, on Sunday afternoons, it stated, there was always a grand concert and a children’s ball. ‘Ah!’ said I to myself, ‘this is the thing for Sunday afternoon. Let us away to the lions and tigers and the children’s ball.’ We hailed a chariot which was on the rank—a regular Lord Mayor’s coach, with room for twenty inside, and magnificently decorated. True, it was about one hundred years old, and it dropped little bits of itself as it rattled over the stones. The coachman was eighty if he was a day, and he sat on the huge box-seat with his feet in great sabots stuffed full of hay. We were able in this immense vehicle to take driving and walking exercise together, for we walked round and round it inside arm-in-arm, while two bony and broken-kneed horses staggered along the streets with it. We told our coachman to take us to the Zoological Gardens. He said nothing, but drove on with us.

In about a quarter of an hour he put us down at the Jardins Publiques, and we entered. Beautiful hothouses, a fine museum, nice lawns and ponds, but no animals. We re-entered the dilapidated Lord Mayor’s coach, and said that was not what we wanted. We desired the gardens with the animals and the children’s ball. Good! Off we drove again.

Presently the old coachman, by a series of feeble gymnastic exertions, dropped himself off the box and came to the carriage-door. ‘Pardon, but would the gentlemen like to see the Museum of Paintings?’ We said we would do anything to oblige so venerable a man; and he took us to the picture gallery. Then we started once more, impressing upon our aged Jehu that the real object of our promenade en voiture was the local Zoo. This time he drove us for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and at last pulled up in a lonely suburb opposite a stone wall, and, landing himself by easy stages to the earth, came hat in hand to the door and begged us to descend.

We descended. He then personally conducted us to a gap in the wall which was boarded up. In one board there was a little hole. ‘Behold, gentlemen,’ he said; ‘if you will give yourselves the trouble to look through that little hole you will see the ground which is being converted into a new public park. It will be finished in two years.’ We looked through and beheld a waste of brick and mortar and plank-strewn ground—and nothing more. ‘But this is not the garden with the animals and the children’s ball!’ I exclaimed, after catching a violent cold in my eye from the wind which blew through the little hole in the hoarding; ‘a truce to practical joking, mon vieux! To the Zoological Gardens at once, or I will swear at you.’ The old man bowed and smiled and grinned, and begged a thousand pardons. He would gladly conduct us to such a place, but he did not know where to find it.

Then I abused him. I told him his conduct was disgraceful—that he had no right to be a coachman in Bordeaux if he did not know the way to its most famous place of public resort. He replied that he had never heard of such a place. Then I called a police-officer, and interrogated him. He, too, knew of no wild animals in Bordeaux, and of no gardens such as I described. We interrogated every passer-by, including a postman. The latter told us that perhaps we meant Paris—there was a garden like that there. In despair we gave up the expedition, and returned in the Lord Mayor’s coach to our hotel.

There we triumphantly produced the local guide-book and read it aloud to the coachman, the concierge, the waiters, and the landlord. It made no impression. One and all declared on their honour, as citizens of Bordeaux, that no such place existed in the town. And they were right. I ascertained the fact by finding an old man who had lived seventy years in Bordeaux, and he told me that when he was a boy there was such a place, but it had disappeared this fifty years. And my guide-book is dated 1885! The editor is a good citizen. He refuses to allow the attractions of his native town to disappear from his pages. He wishes to paint his city to the greatest advantage. He is right from his point of view; but a guide-book which includes exhibitions which have been closed for fifty years—whose very sites have been built over—is not the best companion for a traveller who hires a carriage by the hour in order to drive about and see ‘everything.’

I didn’t trust to that guide-book any more. I quitted Bordeaux on Monday for Bayonne, en route for Biarritz. If you go to Biarritz direct, you must leave by a train at seven in the morning. I don’t love early rising, so I determined to take a later train to Bayonne, from which place you can get on to Biarritz at any time. The distance is 124 miles, and the train does it in seven hours. It was slow, but I did not regret the journey.

CHAPTER II.
IN THE BASQUE COUNTRY.

Bayonne, as all good little girls and boys who take prizes at school for geography and history are aware, is a fortified town commanding the passes of the West Pyrenees, and is a high road to Spain. It was here that the citadel which formed the key to an entrenched camp of Marshal Soult was invested by a portion of the army of the Duke of Wellington in 1814. The whole neighbourhood teems with memories of the halcyon days of the British arms. One comes to many a spot immortalized by a story which makes the Briton’s heart beat faster with patriotic pride. The arms of England may still be seen upon the vault of the cathedral, and in the cemetery lies many a gallant officer and brave soldier of the Coldstream Guards who fell in the sortie of April 14, 1814. It was here—— But for further particulars look up your history. The dead past can bury its dead; my business is with the present.

I had a terrible fright coming from Bordeaux to Bayonne. The railway runs for a portion of the way through the Landes, a vast tract of heaths and ash-coloured sands and brackish streams. The inhabitants of this strange district lead hard and terrible lives. Food is scarce, and, what is worse, they can get very little water that is fit to drink, most of Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s favourite beverage that finds its way to the Landes being salt and nauseous. I reached the Landes after the moon had risen. Owing to a little accident on the line, we were detained at a wayside station for half an hour. I lit a pipe, and strolled outside and made my way down a kind of road that skirted a wild, uncultivated heath. The road was very lonely, and everything looked weird in the moonlight. I was alone, for my companion had sacrificed comfort to a tight boot, and declined to walk. All of a sudden I saw a gigantic shadow thrown on the ground in front of me. I looked up and beheld a man twelve or fourteen feet high stalking towards me with strides that covered ten feet of ground at a time. On, on the giant came at a terrific pace, and the great beads of perspiration broke out upon my brow. He was a wild-looking giant, with long black hair, and a huge sheepskin covered his body. His legs were the longest and the thinnest I had ever seen in my life. I didn’t believe he was human. I made up my mind he was a creature from the fable world, and that I was about to be carried away to his haunt, wherever it may be, and devoured. I thought of Jack and the Beanstalk, and I expected the creature every moment to say, ‘Fee, fo, fum!’ and refer to the fact that the blood of an Englishman had saluted his olfactory organs. Just as I was going to drop on my knees and shriek for mercy, the giant suddenly halted, put a big pole which he carried in his hand behind his back, and stood stock-still in the moonlight, a living, breathing tripod.

I held my breath, and waited for the dénouement. The giant raised his cap, and asked me, in excellent French, if I could tell him what the time was. Then I took a calmer view of him, and suddenly it dawned upon me that my giant was no giant at all, but merely a shepherd of the Landes mounted upon enormous stilts.

I am not the first traveller who has been startled by such an apparition. The inhabitants of this district walk upon stilts from childhood to old age. They would not be able to get over the sandy ground studded with prickly heather in ordinary boots and shoes. They stride over hedges and ditches in this way at a pace which no horse can keep up with, and while they are watching their flocks they stick a long pole in the ground, and, resting their backs against it, stop in this position for hours knitting stockings. The spectacle to the unaccustomed eye is one of the most startling that can be conceived. I told my stilted friend the time, and, wishing him good-night, walked back to the station; but it was a long time before I got over the ‘turn’ which his sudden apparition in the moonlight had given me.

In Bayonne I spent the Mardi Gras and had my ‘carnival.’ The people of the South know how to be merry and enjoy themselves, and they can disguise themselves humorously and in good taste. All night long the quaint streets were crowded with hundreds of masquerading revellers, and the fun was fast and furious. Many of the costumes were Spanish, and really fine pieces of colouring. The ladies were particularly charming, though I fancy some of them must have suffered the next day with rheumatism in the lower limbs, for the roads were damp and muddy, and the wind blew keenly. Wet roads and keen winds are hardly suited to extra short skirts and pink fleshings and dainty little shoes and head-dresses of gauzy lace.

They certainly were not rheumatic on the night of the Mardi Gras, for I procured a box at the theatre and watched the grand carnival ball at its height during the small hours. The masked ball at the Paris Opera House is a grander sight for variety and richness of costume, and the crowd of revellers is greater, but no ball that I have ever witnessed came near to this little Bayonne celebration in mirth and unforced gaiety and rollicking good humour. Heavens, how the natives danced! How they whirled round and round, and capered and kicked their legs up, and laughed and shouted, and threw themselves heart and soul into the maddest of mad quadrilles! I left the theatre at four in the morning, and the Bayonne lads and lasses, masked, disguised, and brilliantly costumed, were hard at it still; and when I got outside into the cool air of the early morning there were still dozens of masqueraders, male and female, promenading the public square arm-in-arm, with never a cloak or a wrap about them, yet not a single cough or sneeze broke in upon the merry laughter that floated on the cool and humid air. I hurried towards my hotel with my overcoat buttoned to my chin, and on my way I passed a little sylph in an airy pink ballet costume, seated on a stone bench, and listening to the old, old story from the lips of a youthful Spanish matador; and the little sylph in pink gauze had taken great care not to sit upon the delicate texture of her skirts. I could understand that the tender passion had warmed her heart, but it must have also spread a glow all over to enable her to listen to the vows of her swain in that costume and on that seat without a single chatter of the teeth.

From Bayonne, before going to Biarritz, I determined to push further into the interior of the Basque country, and see for myself this strange race of people as they are in their mountain homes. Many of the inhabitants of Bayonne are Basque, and all the servants in the hotels. From coachmen, waitresses (there are very few waiters in Basque hotels), peasants, and fishermen, I gleaned a good deal of useful information before starting; but years of study might be devoted to this extraordinary people, the aborigines of Western Europe, who have seen Celts, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Vandals, and Saracens pass away like shadows, and still linger on themselves, retaining their old traditions and superstitions and their old language, which is like no other European tongue. Of their habits and customs, and of their homes, I shall have something to say presently; but I cannot resist giving here a specimen of this extraordinary Basque language, which one hears to-day freely talked, not only in the mountains and the valleys, but in the busy streets of the big towns.

The following paragraph I take from a dialogue between two Basque peasants, which is printed in a Basque paper. An election in the department was fixed for February 27, and it is concerning the merits of the Conservative and the Republican candidate that Batichta and Piarres are engaged in animated converse:

‘Batichta eta Piarres.—Canden igande arratsaldean, bezperetaric lekhora, ikhus, en gintuen Batichta eta Piarres, bi etcheco jaun adiskide handiac, bici bicia mintzo pilota plaza hegal batean. Huna, gero entzun dugunaz, car cerasaten.’

The linguist will see how utterly unlike any European tongue these words are. There is a suggestion of Arabic now and then, and a slight resemblance to a few Finnish and Spanish words; but, as a whole, it is absolutely original. Here is the translation: ‘Last Sunday, in the afternoon, on coming from vespers, we noticed two landowners—Batichta and Piarres—two good friends. They spoke very excitedly at the corner of the Jeu de Paume ground, and here is what they said——’ Then follows a long political conversation.

The Basques are strongly anti-Republican. Hundreds of young men are leaving their villages and going to South America to avoid serving in the army of the Republic. Their fathers would rather let their children go from them to the great land beyond the seas than see them fighting for a Government which they detest. The Basque population swarms in such places as Ecuador, Uruguay, the Brazils, Chili, and the Spanish-speaking portions of South America. Many of them return in after-years, rich and prosperous, to their native mountain homes, and build magnificent châteaux on the site of the old paternal cottages. When they return they are called ‘Americans'; and this rather bothered me, as one day, near Cambo, I had grand villa after villa pointed out to me as the residence of an ‘American.’ By cross-questioning my guides I arrived at the truth. The ‘Americans’ were wealthy Basques who had made fortunes ‘across the seas,’ and come home to be great men among their poorer compatriots. There is a good deal of South America dotted about the Basque country. You come upon the ‘Auberge de Monte Video,’ and the ‘Hôtel de Buenos Ayres,’ and the ‘Auberge de Rio Janeiro.’ My coachman’s sister has married and gone to Peru. My chambermaid’s brother is making money in Chili. An old fisherman who told me all the legends of St. Jean de Luz has two sons at Monte Video. Half the cottagers one talks to have friends and relatives in South America. South America is the El Dorado of the young Basque’s dreams. But when he has made his pile, he likes to come back to the old home, and spend it among his people.

With all these travellers among them, you would think the Basque peasantry would cease to be strongly conservative, that their ideas would broaden, and their exclusiveness would be broken down. But it is not so. They hate railways, and they hate the foreigners to come and disturb their peaceful ways. At Cambo the other day I fell in with a group of small landowners who were discussing the new railway schemes, and they were purple with passion that such an idea should have been mooted.

This conservative spirit among the Basque population is tremendously worked upon at election time. It will be interesting to all who study French politics (and who does not nowadays?) to see the sort of language which a local Conservative candidate indulges in at the expense of the Republic. Listen to this:

For God and for France.

Electors of the Basses Pyrénées,—The struggle begins; the banners are unfolded. On which side should good Catholics and simple and honest folks range themselves? Under the banner of the Republic?

No; for it is this Republic whose dead weight lies upon our unhappy country, and crushes out its life.

Who suppressed the catechism and prayers in our public schools?

Who has driven God from the army?

Who has driven the priest from the bedside of the sick and of the dying?

Who established the anti-Christian and immoral law of divorce?

Who, not content with paganizing France, has robbed her of her fortune and her glory?

Who for the last ten years has augmented by milliards the debt of France?

Who dishonours the armies of France by making them the Armies of the Republic?

Who has left us in all Europe without a single alliance?

Who has led us to the very brink of war, from which God preserve us?

The Republic!

Will you vote for the Republic?

No; you will vote for God and for France—

And for the Conservative candidate.

This inflammatory address is placarded throughout the Basque villages of the department concerned in the election. Crowds of the peasants stand round the walls and read it sympathetically.

Everything is bright and pretty and quaint and picturesque in the Basque country. The men, clean shaven and with fine Saracen faces, in their dark blue berets and red waistbands; the women, with their red, or blue, or black, or yellow toques; the half-Spanish, half-Swiss houses; the carts drawn by yoked oxen; the waggons and diligences with their long string of Spanish mules; the crosses and signs upon the doorways; the Eastern custom of carrying gracefully water-jars upon the head; the tall wooden crosses on every hill and highway—all these things, thrown into relief by a background of glorious scenery, make an impression upon the traveller which does not soon pass away.

The waitress in my hotel, who is at once waitress, femme de chambre, and everything that is useful, is a wonder in her way. Of Spanish Basque origin, she has travelled with families during her early life, and she speaks Spanish, French, German, and Italian, as well as her native Basque. She likes the English, she tells me, and is very proud of the fact that she one day waited on the Prince of Wales when he came incognito to breakfast at the Hôtel St. Martin, at Cambo (a beautiful Basque village about twelve miles from Bayonne). No one knew the Prince, and he and his companions made a good breakfast, and then went about and talked with the villagers, and inspected the farms, and smoked their cigars out on the terrace of the hotel, which overlooks a landscape not to be matched in Switzerland. The Prince talked to my waitress, and asked her what this was in Basque and what that was, and questioned her as to the habits and customs of the country.

To all intents and purposes the royal party were simply English tourists, when suddenly a grand carriage drove up to the hotel. A French duke and another gentleman alighted, and, bowing themselves into the presence of the Prince, invited him to a grand breakfast at Biarritz; and a third gentleman arrived almost immediately with an invitation from the English consul. ‘Thanks,’ said the Prince, laughing; ‘I have breakfasted excellently, and I’m going to spend the day here. Let me enjoy myself in this delightful spot, like good fellows, and go back and say you couldn’t find me.’

My femme de chambre ran on for a quarter of an hour eulogizing the Prince. She has the five-franc piece which he gave her when he paid his bill, and it is to go to her family when she dies as a precious legacy. She believes in royalty tremendously, for the royal family of Portugal, she tells me, always stop at this hotel, and they laugh and talk with her always like old friends. ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘your royal folks when they travel are simple and easily pleased, and they make no fuss. It is your people of small rank who are proud and cold and want so much attention. There is a little German countess who comes here in the season en route for Biarritz, and she travels with a dog and two servants, and she must have the whole of the first-floor reserved for her, and she will take nothing from the servants of the hotel. Her dog even will not notice us, but walks past us with his tail in the air.’

I let my femme de chambre chatter on. She tells me stories of the Empress Eugénie in the old Biarritz days, and tears come into her eyes as she speaks of the dead Prince Imperial. They worship the memory of the imperial family of France all round this district, and have many a pleasant tale to tell of the young lady who lived so much among them in the days before the love of an emperor raised her to the throne. When she has quite finished her royal and imperial anecdotes, I cross-question her as to Basque habits and customs and superstitions. My head is full of the beautiful Basque legends and ghost stories which I have lately picked up, and I ask her if it is true that the people still believe in them. Then she informs me that her venerable father and mother are Basque peasants, and that they themselves believe in witchcraft and sorcery, and all the spells of the Evil One, and all the bad spirits that haunt the mountains and the woods. Her papa has, in fact, just moved out of his house on account of sorcery. He lost last year six cows, and he was so convinced that they had been bewitched, and that a spell had been worked upon his house, that he quitted it, and built another close by. He then sent for the priest to come and bless it, and after that he painted up a big white cross on the front door to keep the evil spirits from entering therein. ‘Superstitious!’ she says. ‘Ah, mon cher monsieur, I have travelled and seen the world, and I know better; but when I go to my native village and say I do not believe in witches and charms and the evil spirits of the night, the peasants cross themselves, and my old father and mother weep and curse themselves for allowing me to leave home and become “une fille perdue.”’

Wandering about the Basque villages, I have gleaned a few of their superstitions. No man, woman, or child among them will be out of doors after midnight, for they all believe that wicked spirits are abroad, and that terrible misfortune will befall anyone who meets them. On certain feast days they light a great fire, and the whole family kneels and prays round the burning wood until it is all reduced to ashes. These ashes are then carefully collected and scattered on the fields to make them fruitful. If any man neglects to propitiate the spirits by strewing these ashes, his crops will fail.

One afternoon I come to a little auberge on the slope of a lonely mountain on the Spanish side. A great white cross is roughly chalked on the door, and outside sits an old woman talking with the landlord and his wife. They are listening with rapt attention, and cross themselves again and again. Presently the old crone goes away, and I sit on the bench and call for something ‘for the good of the house,’ and gradually get the landlord to tell us what the old lady was talking to him about. Then he tells us that last night the old crone saw the ‘arguiduna’ in the village graveyard—the ‘arguiduna’ of her son whom she buried a month since. The ‘arguiduna’ is the soul of a dead person when it takes the shape of a will-o'-the-wisp. This strange light came from her son’s grave, and stopped close to her. As she moved away it followed her, and accompanied her to the old home. On the threshold she stood still, and her son’s soul in its fiery form circled three times round her, and then slowly went up, up, up into the skies till it was lost among the stars. ‘And now,’ says the innkeeper, ‘the old mother is happy, for she has been in great trouble about her boy, for he had been wild and had done many evil things, and she feared it might not be well with his soul. Now that she has seen the “arguiduna” go up like that to the skies, she knows that his sins have been forgiven him, and that he is with the blessed. She will weep for him no more.’

People who live in great cities, where ideas rush at railway speed, and where the bustle and noise of modern life destroy romance and drive fancy from the field, find it difficult to believe that such a superstition as this can be implicitly believed by a whole race of people living in civilized countries in the nineteenth century; but these Basque people believe to this day in all the legends and fables which their ancestors believed a thousand years ago. With them nothing has changed, and to-day they have their Arguiduna; their Maitgarri, or Fairy of the Lakes; the Lamia, a weird being inhabiting the wave-washed coasts; the Jauna, or Spirits of the Wood; and the Sorguinas, the Spirits of the Plains. In these and a hundred other spirits, evil and good, in witches, sorcerers, and devils, the Basque people of to-day believe as firmly and as devoutly as they did in the dark ages. Their daily life, their habits and customs, are all shaped by these superstitions, and their priests, unable to combat them, now tacitly admit them, and even bless many of the charms which they use against the spirits of darkness. And these people live many of them within walking distance of a railway-station, and Liberal candidates address them and canvass for their votes at election time.

Cambo is a lovely Basque village, about twelve miles from Bayonne. Imagine a sweet Swiss valley shut in by an amphitheatre of olive-green and purple hills! Through the valley winds a broad stream of silver water. Fair white houses, and châlets with bright red roofs, throw back the rays of a glorious sun that bathes the scene in golden light. Above is a sky of cloudless blue. Far as the eye can reach all is luxuriance and beauty. As one gazes upon the perfect landscape from the broad stone terrace of the Hôtel St. Martin, a great peace steals into one’s soul, and the cares and troubles of the outer world are for a time forgotten. On the slope of the hill which faces this glorious scene stands a quaint Basque village. The people live by the land, which yields a bounteous harvest. They keep the simple manners and customs of bygone centuries; they have been here, undisturbed by the rattle of traffic and the snort of the railway engine, ever since the place came into existence; and now, if you please, the French are going to desecrate their village with a railway. There is to be a station at Cambo. The inhabitants are furious; the landowners have refused to sell their land, and the Government replies that if they persist it will be taken from them by force.

My sympathies are with Cambo. A railway will destroy the poetry of the place. All the Basque people ask is to be allowed to live quietly in their homes. They don’t want to be hustled by a crowd of townsfolk, whose ways are not their ways, and who speak a foreign language. Even the rich ‘Americans,’ whose splendid châteaux dot the hills, are crying out. They are Basque to the backbone, and they don’t want excursionists gaping about their grounds, and driving over them in their winding, tree-shaded roadways.

But I must not go Basque-mad, and imagine everyone is as interested in the people as I am. Let us return to modern civilization, and go to Biarritz. My coachman drives me there from Bayonne. He is a beautiful creature, my coachman. He wears the old postilion jacket and hat. He is trimmed with scarlet and silver lace, and my arithmetic stops short in an attempt to add up his buttons. His little jacket alone costs £5; his waistcoat costs £1; his hat costs 15s.; and his horses have bells all over them, so that we make merry music as we dash along the roads, and the whip cracks joyously, and the dogs bark a concert in our rear, and the children pursue us at full speed, yelling for coppers; and that’s how we go to Biarritz.

CHAPTER III.
FROM BIARRITZ TO BURGOS.

Biarritz disappoints one at first, and then grows upon one. It is like a jumble of Ilfracombe, Westgate-on-Sea, the Land’s End, Ostend, and Broadstairs. The sea dashes in gloriously, and makes tremendous breaches in coast and cliff. The hotels are as grand as money can make them, and on the Parade, in all their glory, I came suddenly upon Mary Ann and Susan, two English nursemaids, in the usual hats and feathers, and the usual imitation fur-trimmed jackets, and the usual fingers through the gloves, wheeling unmistakable English perambulators, full of unmistakable English babies; and when, later on, I came upon Eliza Jane sitting down and reading the London Journal while her perambulator was gently working itself, baby and all, over the parade on to the beach, I actually looked up and down and round about for the Life Guardsman.

The French bonnes and the Basque nurses, so clean, so neatly dressed, must have been considerably astonished when Mary Ann and Eliza Jane first came from Clapham to the Bay of Biscay. Even now they eye their ostrich feathers, their brooches, and their fur-trimmed jackets with awe. I earnestly trust the awe is not mixed with admiration. It would be a very terrible thing if the neat and picturesque French bonne, corrupted by the English example, suddenly broke out into hats and feathers, and bad boots and rusty finger-twisted gloves. The downfall of France would then be assured. Whichever way I turn, the British nursemaid meets me and defies me. I sit down to contemplate a grand effect of wave-washed rock, and a female voice behind me shouts to Master Tommy not to go too near the edge; I climb the cliffs and gaze at the distant coast of Spain, and a little imp in a sailor costume, with a broken spade and a sand-grimed bucket, assaults me with, ‘Please, sir, can you tell me the time?’ I find a lovely romantic spot right out on the extreme ledge of an overhanging rock, and, on turning round to look back at the town, I see a young woman behind me nursing a baby and reading the Family Herald. When I rise and fly to the streets for refuge, when I gaze into the shop windows at the fans and tambourines of Spain, the English nursemaid still pursues me. A perambulator is wheeled across my heels, and the wheeleress says, ‘Beg yer pardon, sir; I ‘ope I didn’t ‘urt you!’

Ye gods! Is it for this I have travelled many hundreds of miles? Is it for this I have been saturating myself with the language and the legends of the Basques? I go to an hotel and order my lunch. At the next table to me are a young gentleman and a young lady. The young gentleman says, ‘Are you coming to the lawn-tennis ground this afternoon?’ and the young lady replies, ‘No; Jack’s going to drive me to St. Jean de Luz in his dogcart.’ It is all English—everywhere English, and nothing but English. The stationers’ shops are full of English valentines and English books; the grocers’ shops display English jams and English pickles; the chemists’ shops have their windows stocked with English patent medicines, and English pills and English plaisters; and, as I live, when I turn to make a mad dash for the railway-station, two little boys come along arm-in-arm, and as they walk they whistle ‘Grandfather’s Clock'!

Oh, for the lost illusions of my youth! Oh, for the Biarritz of my dreams! I am at Margate; I am at Brighton; I am at Eastbourne; I am anywhere and everywhere on the coast of England; but I can’t possibly be on the Biscayan shores, and almost within hail of the Spanish coast! Sadly I enter the train, and return to Bayonne and a foreign land. I like England in England; but to come to Biarritz and find everything British, to be abroad and to be run down by London nursemaids, and to have ‘Grandfather’s Clock’ all over again, is worse than earthquakes to me.

After the shock of the English nursemaids wore off, I appreciated Biarritz at its true value, and I ceased to wonder that it had such a large winter colony of English. All along this coast there are huge hotels, which are kept open in the winter solely on account of the English. At St. Jean de Luz, a lovely little seaside spot, I saw a whole dozen of English Mary Janes and Sarah Anns sitting on the Parade in the warm sunshine, and talking, I suppose, of the lovers they had left in dear old England far away. While I was in the post-office, an English nursemaid came in and sat down at the table, and put the stamps lovingly on a letter she had in her hand, and I was curious enough to look over her shoulder and read the address. It was ‘Private John Smith, The Barracks, Chelsea.’ How I wished I could see under the envelope! I should like to read a description of life on the Basque coasts from the pen of a true-born British nursemaid, reared in all the insular prejudices and antipathies.

If I had to choose the spot where I would spend my winter, it would not be Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz, but San Sebastian, the Spanish watering-place, where in the season the Spanish aristocracy are so numerous you can walk on their heads. I should want a chapter to do justice to this glorious spot, so I must pass it by with just a nod of friendly recognition, and continue my journey—a journey which was nearly being interrupted in a manner which, much as I desire novel experiences, I am heartily glad that I was spared.

My original idea was to return from Bayonne to Bordeaux, and then take the Pacific mail steamer for Lisbon, working from thence to Seville and Granada, and then to Madrid, and so up through Spain into France and home again. I had even gone so far as to send to the shipping office for the tickets. My messenger returned with the information that the ship would be the Valparaiso, but that we could not have berths until the agent received a telegram from Liverpool telling him if there were any vacant. On the day before we were to return to Bordeaux, we received a letter from the agent saying we could have berths. We packed up. We were on the point of starting to Bordeaux, when, sitting in my armchair after dinner, I fell asleep and had a dream. I dreamt that I was shipwrecked. I felt the water closing over my head. I struck out and tried to swim, but the great waves struck me and threw me back. I clung to spars; I shouted for help. I went through a whole catalogue of agonies; and, just as a big shark was opening his mouth to swallow me, I woke up with a start. ‘It is time to go,’ said Albert Edward. ‘The omnibus is at the door. Shall I send the luggage down?’ ‘No,’ I exclaimed, starting up and rubbing my eyes. ‘No; a hundred times no! I’ve had a dream, and nothing will tempt me to make that sea-trip now.’ A few days after, in the reading-room of our hotel in Madrid, I picked up a newspaper, and saw that the Valparaiso, the ship by which we should have sailed but for that dream, had been wrecked in Vigo Bay, and that all the passengers’ luggage had been lost.

I am always anxious for adventures which will furnish material for my books, but I very much prefer to rely upon my imagination for my shipwrecks. A good many people have described earthquakes without being in them, and I am sure I can give a good account of ‘an awful night at sea’ without being taken off in a small boat and losing my luggage.

Instead of going by sea, we went by land, and the next day found us in the sleeping-car en route from Bayonne to Burgos, our first halting-place on our way to Madrid. The French authorities arrange this journey admirably. You arrive at Hendaye, the French frontier, at five minutes past twelve, and here you have half an hour for luncheon. The train then goes on, and reaches Irun in five minutes, where the Spanish authorities, not to be outdone in politeness, give you an hour. It is a battle between France and Spain which shall have the buffet money. Seeing that you have an hour at Irun, I can in no other way account for the absurdity of giving you half an hour at Hendaye. A run of two and a quarter miles in an hour and a half is surely the best on record for a special express train like the Paris-Madrid mail bound on a journey of 968 miles.

At Irun we entered on Spanish territory, Spanish customs, and Spanish manners. We received the utmost courtesy at the station and in the Custom House, and everywhere along the line. And we did it all with a well-filled case of halfpenny cigars. No official in the world is so polite or appreciates politeness so much as a Spanish one. The French are artificially polite, the Spaniards are naturally so. Hats are raised everywhere, faces are wreathed in smiles, bows are low and stately. To the chiefs of stations, to Custom House officers, after a few words of courteous inquiry, we offered a cigar. If we had offered gold and precious stones our gift could not have been received with greater sweetness and recognition. And for those few cigars we were treated everywhere like princes. Gold-braided caps-in-hand, stationmasters wished us a pleasant journey, and guards came and mounted on the steps and peeped in and inquired as to our comfort. At the end of the journey I really felt ashamed that we had received so much for so little. On the return journey we are going to fill that cigar-case with penny ones.

The run through the Pyrenees in the blazing sunshine was magnificent. When the train stopped, high up upon the great mountains, we got out and let our faces bronze, inhaled the splendid mountain air, and contrasted the scene around us (it was Sunday afternoon) with the aspect of Tottenham Court Road and Camden Town. We pitied the people in London, and we wondered if they were having a fog and crouching over their fires with the gas alight, and we made up our minds, when we were rich enough to retire, to come and end our days in the sunshine of the Pyrenees. The difficulty must be to end your days there. Unless you go up to the top of a precipice, and throw yourself deliberately over, it is difficult to see what can kill you in such a splendidly healthy, bracing air—in a land of perpetual life-giving sunshine.

The guard of our train was a very wonderful man, I have heard of a sailor who had a wife in every port, but we almost came to the conclusion that our guard had a wife at every station. Whenever the train stopped there was a young woman waiting, who was instantly kissed on both cheeks by our guard. Some of the ladies he kissed had little boys and girls with them, and he kissed the children too. It was to us a matter of much speculation as to what this constantly-recurring lady waiting to be kissed by our guard could mean. It remains a mystery to this hour. Perhaps he was one of a very large family, and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts had scattered and settled all along the line.

At Miranda we had ‘buffet’ again. It was a wonderful meal—real Spanish cookery, everything done in oil; but it was by no means bad. The wonderful thing about it was the way in which the passengers got through a meal of ten courses in fifteen minutes by the clock. It was one plate down and another up. The waiters actually galloped round the table piling plates full of soup, fish, entrée, joint, fowl, salad, pastry, cheese, and fruit before the astonished passengers. Heavens, how we ate! How we finished one plate and pushed it aside and seized the full one by our side! No changing knives and forks. It was just one wild waltz from dish to dish, and when the bell rang and we rushed out to the train we carried oranges and apples and figs and dates and biscuits in our hands. I had an indigestion five minutes afterwards which has lasted up to now, and which bids fair to remain with me until the end of my chequered career.

The rest of the journey was performed in the dark. The only bit of colour was made by our gens d’armes, who, with loaded rifles, accompanied the train, and were changed at each station. All trains in Spain carry two of these men—‘Civil Guards’ they are called—to protect the passengers in case of attack. These men, a picked body, without fear and without reproach, have cleared Spain of brigands. They are to Spain what the Irish constabulary was once to Ireland. They are unbribable, and have only one idea—duty. They are empowered to shoot at their own discretion, and they are trusted not to make a mistake. There is no arresting with them. A man taken red-handed, they put a bullet into. Spanish justice is slow—a man sent for trial knows there are a hundred ways of getting acquitted, and failing that of escaping from prison. So the Spanish Civil Guard executes its own justice in a speedy and summary manner. Murderers and brigands they kill first and try afterwards. These men have made Spain safe for the traveller for the first time for many hundreds of years.

Our halting-place was Burgos. Here we left the train, and began our first experience of Spanish towns and Spanish hotel life. We had been reading up our guide-books, and we alighted with doubt and dread. We were told that the hotels were bad, and that the people were difficult to deal with. But we had a little knowledge of the language, and we had determined to conform literally to Spanish customs and to observe the forms of Spanish etiquette, and so we hoped to fare better than the bulk of English travellers who, in print and out of it, have made such a parade of the drawbacks to a sojourn in Spain.

These Spanish customs are most interesting. They must be observed by anyone who wants to get on with the people. The usual British idea of looking upon natives as ‘a lot of foreigners’ won’t do here. If you insist upon being English and doing as you would in England you will have a very bad time among a people who are the proudest and the most sensitive in Europe. Cast your British prejudices to the wind, and try to be Spanish, and you will carry home with you pleasant memories which will last you all your life. We decided to be Spanish down to the ground, to treat every man as a grandee, and to praise everything we saw with all the adjectives we could find the Spanish for in our dictionary.

In the first place, we commenced to practise worshipping each other’s hats. The hat in Spain is elevated almost to the position of an idol. When anyone comes to see you, you place his hat in an armchair all to itself. You take it from him at the door. With loving care you bear it across the room, and then, with many flowery speeches, you deposit the sacred tile gently on the right-hand chair of honour. All Spanish sitting-rooms are arranged for this ceremony. They contain no furniture, as a rule, but a sofa, a console table, and some chairs, and this gives them a bare appearance, which is not decreased by the entire absence of a fireplace.

The sofa in the Spanish room is put against the wall in the right-hand corner. In front of it on each side are two chairs, one an armchair, and the other an ordinary one. The sofa and the four chairs are so arranged as to form three sides of a square. The sofa is for you and your guests, the armchairs are for their hats, and the smaller chairs for ornament. This ‘reception of the hat’ sounds like an exaggeration, but it is a ceremony which is observed with the greatest punctiliousness all through Spain. My companion and I practised it in our sitting-room for hours. First he knocked at the door and pretended to be a Spanish hidalgo, and I received him, took his hat and conducted it, walking backwards, to the armchair. Then I recited verses in its honour, kissed its brim, and bestowed titles upon it. Then he received me and my hat, and we buttered each other up in our best Spanish and bowed to each other till our backs ached. We very soon got perfect in the art of receiving gentlemen visitors, and, of course, that was all we wanted, as we were not likely to have any lady visitors.

When you go to a lady’s house there are terrible ceremonies to be gone through. When you rise to leave you are bound to say, ‘A los piés de usted’ (this last word is always written thus, ‘V.’ simply, in Spanish), ‘señora.’ ‘My lady, I place myself at your feet.’ Then the lady says, ‘Beso á V.’ (usted that V. means) ‘la mano, caballero.’ ‘I kiss your hand, sir.’ ‘Vaya V. con Dios que V. lo pase bien.’ ‘May you depart with God and continue well.’ Then you have to answer to that, ‘Quede V. con Dios.’ ‘May you remain with God.’ And so you go, your hat being handed to you as if it were a new-born baby.

The salutations and greetings and farewells among the common people are many of them very poetical. When I left my first Spanish hotel, the waiter and the chambermaid came out with the landlord to see us off. My companion and I laid ourselves figuratively at the chambermaid’s feet; we invoked all the blessings of Heaven on the landlord’s head, and, in accordance with Spanish etiquette, we expressed a hope that the waiter might remain with God. The group returned our adieux, and the little chambermaid made us a sweet reverence in the Andalusian manner (she was of Seville, was our ‘chica'), and said, ‘Good-bye, your lordships; may we all meet again some day in God’s big parlour.’ Now, I think that was very pretty—don’t you?

‘Chica’ means sweetheart. It is another pretty custom in Spanish inns to call the waitress ‘chica.’ It sounds odd at first to English ears—‘Sweetheart, bring me a glass of beer;’ ‘Sweetheart, a cup of chocolate;’ ‘Sweetheart, do you call these boots blacked, or have you given them to the dog to lick?’ When an inn is full, and everybody is shouting for his ‘sweetheart,’ the Englishman unused to the form of address, but knowing a little of the language, wonders what it means. But he soon drops into the habit, and addresses the dark-eyed Spanish muchacha as ‘chica,’ too.

Spain is saturated with Moorish manners and customs. The Eastern custom of clapping the hands, instead of calling the waiter or attendant, prevails everywhere. You never hear a sound of ‘Waiter!’ in a café, only here and there two sharp short claps of the hand. The effect is pleasing, and it saves your throat considerably.

But I am keeping you waiting a long time before taking you to see Burgos, and I have told you nothing about hotel life.

The first things that strike you as you enter an old Spanish town at night are the dark and mysterious-looking men gliding along in the dark shadows, cloaked to the eyes. Nearly all Spaniards still wear the old ‘capa,’ or long black mantle, and the folds of this are so arranged as to completely muffle the face, leaving only the eyes visible. The Castilians muffle like this in the hottest weather. They dread a breath of fresh air. But it makes them look awfully like murderers, and it gave us quite a creepy sensation as we plodded through old, decaying Burgos, late at night, and came suddenly on men muffled in black to the eyes at the street corners. But having occasion to ask one to direct us to the hotel, he instantly flung his cloak from his face and disclosed his features. This is another Spanish custom. If you keep your cloak over your face when you stop anyone, or when you address anyone, you are at once supposed to be a bad character, or an assassin, and the man talking to you clasps his knife or his revolver, and gets ready for you.

We reached the hotel in Burgos in safety, and walked upstairs, and found a gentleman smoking a cigarette in an easy-chair, who rose and bowed, and told us to choose what rooms we liked and to make ourselves at home, and God be with us; and then he sat down and lit another cigarette. We chose our rooms, then went down and bargained with the gentleman for so much a day. All hotels in Spain lodge and feed you at so much a day, and you have to make the contract on arrival. There are no extras when once you have agreed to the price. We arranged at 50 reals a day each (a real is 2½d.). For this we had our rooms and the following meals: The desayuno in the bedroom, a cup of chocolate and a piece of sour bread; the almuerzo, or lunch, at eleven; the comida, or dinner, at seven. The Spanish lunch begins generally with eggs cooked in various fashions, then a roast, then the fish, very highly flavoured, then salad and the sweets and dessert. The fish is always served after meat. The dishes for dinner are few, but curious, and the cooking is excellent for those with cosmopolitan palates. The dishes cooked in oil are not deserving the opprobrium heaped upon them by bigoted British guide-book writers. The Spaniards do not over-eat like the French, and the meals are not long ones. But between every course at table d’hôte Spaniards smoke a cigarette. It is an excellent idea for filling in the waits; but English ladies don’t like it. There were no ladies and no English at our first table d’hôte, so we adopted the custom of the country.

Burgos is a grand old city, famous in history for many things, but for nothing so much as being the city of the Cid. You know who the great Cid was, or you ought to, so I won’t tell you. We saw his bones, and the bones of Ximena, his wife—the real bones and the real skulls, in a real coffin, in a room in the Prefecture hung with banners and patriotic emblems. Of course we saw the cathedral and the ancient gates and the old Palace of the Inquisition, now fallen to ruins. We stood and smoked cigarettes in the grass-grown courtyard, where many a hero had been done to death, where the hideous tortures devised by human fiends were carried out in the blasphemed name of God, and we leaned against old crumbling pillars that had looked down upon scenes of the most unutterable human anguish. All is but as a dream now, yet the old stones and pillars remain to this day, and cry out against the infamy of that dark and cruel era in the blood-stained annals of Spain. The rooms around, which look down upon the courtyard, are let to the poor at a shilling or two a month. The Palace of the Inquisition is now a slum, and from the windows where monarchs and grandees and Grand Inquisitors looked down hang the yellow rags of beggars and the blue sheets of poor labourers drying in the sun.

Burgos at night is the absolutely dullest place I ever saw in my life, and that is saying a good deal. Some Spanish gentlemen who had made friends with us at the hotel took us to a café, and we spent the evening in getting all the information out of them that we could. The theatre was shut, there was no music-hall, no entertainment of any kind. There is no trade in Burgos, and how the people live is a mystery. But for the military the place would be a city of the dead. And yet it is the capital of proud Castile, and was at one time the residence of kings. At ten at night I have the quiet deserted town almost to myself. I want to tire myself out and make myself sleep if I can, for my old enemy insomnia dogs my footsteps still. I smoke a cigarette under the shadow of the great cathedral. I cross the bridge of the dried-up Arlanzon (all the rivers of Spain have been emptied in consequence of the rapidly-increasing export of Spanish wines), and I linger by the ruins of the house of the mighty Cid. Everywhere I am alone save for some cloaked and muffled figure that steals past me now and then, stealthily and silently as a man bent on a mission of midnight assassination.

I am not afraid. Albert Edward is always close by me with a sword-stick, a revolver, and a pair of fists that, though they have not much skill, would be extremely useful in splitting pavingstones or breaking heads; and, better than all, the old Sereno, or night-watchman, who, with his lantern, his pointed staff, and his whistle, paces every street. The Sereno has plenty of work at night in a Spanish town. In addition to his duties as a watchman, he calls the hours. Quaint and weird upon the night air floats the old watchman’s cry, ‘Ten o’clock at night, and all’s well!’ ‘Las diez y sereno!’ It is from this last word, which means ‘All serene!’ that the watchman takes his name of ‘Sereno.’

He sees a good deal of the night side of (Spanish) nature, does the old Sereno. He passes my lady’s balcony at midnight, and sees the cloaked lover underneath twanging his guitar. He sees the lights in the rooms in the small hours when the watchers of the sick keep their long vigils, and he is the first to tumble over the bodies of the wounded and the murdered at the street corners. Then his whistle rings out clear and shrill over the silence, and the police come up and bear the body away. Assassinations are still common enough in Spain. Every street-corner is famous for somebody who was done to death at it. The lower classes and many of the middle classes still carry the murderous ‘navaja,’ and justice rarely overtakes the midnight assassin. Some of the murders are political, but most of them are ‘all on account of Eliza.’ The Spanish men are furiously jealous, and the Spanish women are terrible flirts. The national custom of concealing your features entirely at night lends itself splendidly to the use of the knife at dark street-corners.

We left Burgos by the night mail for Madrid. At the hotel they gave us an omnibus. The roof was so low that we had to crawl in on our hands and knees and lie flat on the cushions till we got to the station. There we were the only passengers, but the station-master (another halfpenny cigar did it) took us to his own private room and gave us armchairs in front of his private fire while we waited. He took our hats and placed them in royal state on more armchairs, and when the train arrived he personally conducted us to it, recommended us to the guard, and, bestowing on us all the titles of the noblest grandees of Old Castile, expressed a devout desire that he, too, might have the honour of renewing our acquaintance in God’s big parlour.

CHAPTER IV.
MADRID—BULL FIGHTS, THEATRES, CAFÉS, AND COCIDO.

The journey from Burgos to Madrid takes ten hours by the express. There is only one good train a day to anywhere in Spain. When it doesn’t start at eight at night it starts at eight in the morning. This is a dreadful nuisance to people who object equally to travelling all night and to getting up at six in the morning. All trains, except the one express, are fearfully slow. You can take twenty-two hours to do a hundred miles on some of the lines.

The Spaniards have a couplet which runs thus:—‘El aire de Madrid es tan sotil Que mata à un hombre y no apaga un candil.’ This, in plain English, means that the subtle air of Madrid, which won’t extinguish a candle, will put out a man’s life. For two or three days in Madrid I was up in the stirrups. I think I have been ill in all the principal towns of the United Kingdom and the Continent; but in Madrid, for the first time for many years, I felt absolutely well. The dry, exhilarating air suited me admirably. I did an endless round of sightseeing by day, I went to three or four theatres at night, and I stopped in the magnificent cafés until the waiters began to pile the chairs on the tables and put on their hats and cloaks to go home to their families. And when I got back to my hotel I sat up in my room and wrote till the small hours. With all this exertion, I was able to get up early the next morning, with a beautiful complexion and a perfect temper.

But with my first bull-fight a change came o’er the spirit of my dream. On Sunday all Madrid crowded to the great open arena, ‘La Plaza de Toros.’ On Monday all Madrid was coughing and sneezing, and I outcoughed and outsneezed them all. The stone seats of the bull-ring and the boxes open to all the winds of heaven are dear to the hearts of doctors and undertakers. The sun beats down upon an excited multitude, and it is not till nearly sunset that the last bull dies. Then out the great populace pours, and takes a chill at the most dangerous hour of the day. I caught a champion cold at the bull-fight, and it was no consolation to me that everywhere I went during the next two or three days there was a chorus of coughs, and that all my neighbours were as miserable as myself. At the theatre on Monday evening the play I witnessed was absolutely performed in dumb show. The actors strove in vain to make themselves audible over the perpetual hacking and barking of an audience in the agonies of asthma, the inconveniences of influenza, the convulsions of catarrh, and the breath-battle of bronchitis.

The arrangements at Spanish theatrical performances are unique. They must be seen to be believed. But before I come to the theatres I have to get through the bull-fight, and before I come to the bull-fight I should like to say a word or two about the illustrious gentlemen who get their living by it, and who are commonly called toreros. This term includes the espadas, the picadors, and the banderilleros, whose various parts in the performance will presently be made clear to you.

The profession of bull-fighter is in Spain the royal road to fortune. There are half a dozen men, not yet middle-aged, who have become millionaires by killing bulls, and their names are idolized wherever the Spanish language is spoken. Their society is courted by the highest nobles in the land, and they are au mieux with many a fair and aristocratic dame. The leading matadors ('espadas’ is the technical name) receive for a single afternoon’s show sums varying from £200 to £500. They star in the provinces on sharing terms, and when you take into account the fact that a good ‘house’ at a bull-fight means between two and three thousand pounds, you can imagine what these starring engagements are worth. After they have conquered Spain they go to South America, and there some of them make sums which would cause even Sir Henry Irving and Madame Sarah Bernhardt to open their eyes to their fullest extent.

Mazzantini, who at the time of my visit was starring in Havannah, was the idol of the hour. Long telegrams were published in the principal Spanish papers announcing his magnificent receptions, and describing in ‘the language of the ring’ his feats with the bulls. Some time ago Mazzantini, who as a bull-fighter makes £20,000 a year, was a porter on the Great Northern Railway of Spain. He was strong and handsome and full of pluck, and he said to himself, ‘I want to make money. In Spain there are only two ways—to be a tenor or a bull-fighter. I can’t sing, but I know I could kill a bull.’ He began as one of the gang of assistants at small shows; he soon acquired skill, and to-day whenever he travels his is a royal progress; his diamonds are the envy of prima donnas, he has his town mansion and his shooting-box and his villa at the seaside, and the reigning belles of Society send him love-letters. Frascuelo, who has now retired, being rich beyond the dreams of avarice, was nearly being made a marquis by King Amadeus.

To read of these riches and honours, to see the receptions given to these princes of the ring by all grades of society, you would think that a bull-fight was a magnificent spectacle, and the matadors were men of splendid bravery and consummate skill.

You had better sit a Corrida de Toros out with me from beginning to end, and then you will be able to form your own judgment. There is one thing, however, you must do first, and that is, get rid entirely of your English views with regard to cruelty to animals. You will see plenty of that; but if you argue with a Spaniard about it he will tell you that you are quite as cruel to animals, only in another way, in England. You will reply that in your sports where the death of an animal is involved the animal has ‘a chance.’ In bull-fighting the animals have none.

But if you are wise, you will not argue at all. You will take a bull-fight as it is, and come away thankful that it is not the national sport of England. There have been many attempts to revive it in the South of France, and the French would, I fancy, take kindly to it, if it were once made legal, and could be carried out with all the pomp and splendour of Spain.

All Englishmen do not dislike bull-fighting. Many Englishmen who live in Spain follow it enthusiastically; and a young Irish gentleman of fortune at one time took to the bull-ring professionally, and attained a certain amount of distinction.

Madrid is covered with red bills announcing a bull-fight for Sunday. The bills are curious reading and interesting to the student of the language of Cervantes. Here is one of them:

PLAZA DE TOROS DE MADRID
———
CORRIDA EXTRAORDINARIA
QUE SE VERIFICARÁ (SI EL TIEMPO NO LO IMPIDE)
EL DOMINGO 6 DE MARZO DE 1887
——
PRESIDIRÀ LA PLAZA LA AUTORIDAD COMPETENTE
—
ORDEN DE LA FUNCIÓN

1.º CUATRO TOROS de puntas, defectuosos, de las ganaderías y con las divisas siguientes: DOS, con azul turquí, de la acreditada de Don Manuel Bañuelos y Salcedo, de Colmenar Viejo, y DOS, con blanca, de la de Don Alejandro Arroyo (antes Mazpule), de Miraflores de la Sierra.

LIDIADORES

Picadores.—Francisco Parente (El Artillero), Francisco Coca, Antonio Bejarano (El Cano) y Mariano Ledesma (El Morenito), sin que en el case de inutilizarse los cuatro pueda exigirse que salgan otros.

ESPADAS
Rafael Guerra (Guerrita), de Córdoba
Julio Aparici (Fabrilo), de Valencia

Banderilleros.—Miguel Almendro, Rafael Rodriguez (Mojino), José Martínez (Pito), Rafael Sánchez (Bebe), Rafael Llorens y Miguel Burguet (Pajalarga).

Sobresaliente de espada.—Miguel Almendro.

Puntillero.—Antonio Guerra.

Y 2.º CUATRO NOVILLOS EMBOLADOS para los aficionados que gusten bajar al redondel á capearlos.

La corrida empezará á las TRES Y MEDIA en punto
Las puertas de la Plaza se abrirán dos horas antes

Se observarán con todo rigor las prevenciones vigentes para esta clase de espectáculos.

La banda de música de Baleares tocará antes de empezar la corrida y en los intermedios.

Toda ocalidad que exceda de una peseta pagará diez centimos de impuesto.

ADVERTENCIAS

Los billetes se venderán en el Despacho establecido en la calle de Sevilla, el Viernes 4 del corriente, de una á cinco de la tarde, el Sábado 5 de diez de la mañana hasta las cinco de la tarde, y el Domingo 6, día de la corrida, de neuve de la mañana á tres y media de la tarde, y en los de la Plaza de Toros desde la una y media en adelante.

Después de tomados los billetes no se admitirán en los Despachos sino en el caso de que se suspenda la función antes de comenzada; no se darán contraseñas de salida y los ninos que no sean de pecho necesitan billete.

No se correrán más torros ni novillos que los anunciados.

No se permitirá estar entre barreras sino á los precisos operarios, ni bajar de los tendidos hasta que el último toro esté enganchado al tiro de mulas.

Se prohibe bajar á torear los novillos embolados á los niños y ancianos, á fin de evitar desgracias, así como que lleven palos, pinchos ú otros objetos con que puedan perjudicar al ganado.

Four bulls are to be killed, each four years old. Their names are Bailador, Cigarrero, Manquito, and Primoroso. The ‘stars’ on this occasion are the two espadas, Guerrita and Fabrilio. The first man is a famous matador; the second a beginner. Having made the acquaintance of a retired bull-fighter—an affable, gray-haired old gentleman, who still wears the chignon and pigtail, which are de rigueur, and by which you can always tell a bull-fighter in the crowd—I ask him to accompany me, and explain the points of the performance. He readily consents, and he secures me a private box next to the box of the president—the gentleman, generally a member of the Town Council, who is the official master of the ceremonies, judge, referee, and several other things rolled into one. I ought to mention that, the arena being open to the sky, one-half of the spectators have to sit with the blazing sun in their faces. This causes one side to be dearer than the other. There are two prices—the sol and the sombra. Seats in the shade are 50 per cent. the dearer. When I enter my box in the great arena, the spectacle is a magnificent one. Sixteen thousand people are crowded into the building, and a fourth of them are women. There are elegantly-dressed ladies in the boxes, and in the cheaper seats are gaily-attired women and girls of the lower class. Many of the women have brought their babies with them to see the show. Everybody is on the tiptoe of expectation. As we enter our box, my friend the bull-fighter has a friendly greeting from the mob. In the next box is a duke—a grandee of Spain of the first class—and a general renowned in war. Both of them lean over and shake hands effusively with my friend the bull-killer. Presently the president and his suite enter the official box. Then a trumpet sounds, and two alguazils, dressed in black velvet suits and plumed hats, ride into the ring on gaily-caparisoned steeds. They wheel round, face the president, and bow. The president then bids them summon the bull-fighters. Off go the alguazils across the ring with the message. The gates of the barrier are flung open, and a grand procession enters, and marches across the arena to salute the president. This is the prettiest part of the show. The costumes of the twenty or thirty toreros are brilliant and beautiful. Silver and gold, and yellow and crimson and blue are their jackets and breeches; their hats, of black velvet, are most picturesque; and their mantles, worn in a peculiar fashion, are such as the courtiers of a king might be proud to wear on gala days. Terrific applause breaks from the huge crowd of spectators as popular favourites advance with the band. About six of the men are mounted on wretched, broken-down horses. These men carry long lances, and are the picadors. You will see what they do presently.

The procession having saluted the president, the members of it scatter themselves about the arena, and prepare for business. Another trumpet sounds. The alguazil, in black velvet, rides up again and salutes the president. The president from his box flings him the key of the cells where the bulls are imprisoned, and he catches it in his hat. He hands the key to a torero, who opens the door of a kind of stable opposite, called the toril, and, out of the darkness into the light, out of the silence into the roar of thousands of voices, rushes an infuriated bull, full of life and spirit and courage—a magnificent beast, with terrible horns, already goaded to fierceness by sharp spikes which have been run into him in his prison.

He enters the arena alone. Everybody except the picadors leaps the barriers, and lets him have a run to himself. We are all on the tiptoe of expectation to see how the bull will behave. We can judge by his manner at first what sort of sport he will give. Now several of the toreros, mantle in hand, take their places, and begin to bait the bull to make him lively, and then the first act of the tragedy begins. Unfortunately for the foreigner who wants to see sport in a bull-fight, the first act is the most disgusting and dastardly. The picadors—the men with lances, mounted on wretched horses—have it to themselves. The picador, sitting bolt upright on his horse, charges the bull, and digs the spear into him just to tickle him up. The picador then prepares to receive the return charge of the bull. He turns his horse broadside to the bull (the poor horses have their eyes bandaged on one side), and calmly allows the infuriated beast to plunge its sharp horns right into the side of the steed. No attempt is made to save the horse. It is only used by the picador as a barrier between himself and the bull’s horns.

If the bull catches the horse fairly underneath, the sight is a hideous one. The wretched animal staggers and falls over, the life blood pouring from it. The audience shouts with delight. The men with the cloaks rush and turn the bull from the prostrate heap, and then pick the picador up. He always falls cleverly, and his legs, being encased in iron, are rarely hurt either by the bull’s horns or the falling horse. If the horse is only wounded, it is beaten on to its legs again with sticks, and the wound is stuffed with tow. It is remounted, beaten, and dragged up to the bull to be gored again. On the day of my visit, I saw a horse with its entrails hanging out actually dragged up, cruelly beaten, and remounted. This was considered glorious sport by the Spaniards. As they rode that poor disembowelled beast round the arena again, the spectacle was so hideous that I went to the corner of my box. ‘When that horse is dead, tell me, and I’ll look again,’ I said to my friend the bull-fighter. He laughed, but the next minute he leaned across to the president and said something. The president smiled and raised his hat to me, and then called down an order to one of the ring attendants. A moment afterwards the picador dismounted, and the staggering, bleeding horse was mercifully killed with a blow of the ‘puntilla.’ I saved one poor beast a few moments’ agony, at any rate, that day.

I saw four bulls killed, and the bulls between them killed seven horses. It was always a great relief to me when the bugle sounded, and the horses still living were led out of the ring. Each bull has so many minutes to live, and goes through three acts. The first with the picadors, the second with the banderilleros, and the third with the espada or matador. A bugle sounds the ‘time’ which terminates each act of the tragedy. I was always glad when the first act was over and the horses were done with. But my delight at seeing one or two go out alive was considerably modified when I was informed that the poor beasts would be kept half-starved until the following Sunday, and then brought out to be gored again. Many of the horses I saw were only fit for the knacker, but they had been good in their time. Some of them still retained fine action, and had probably, in the days of their strength, drawn the carriage of some aristocratic dame now looking down upon the ruthless slaughter. The horses are in no way necessary for the bull-fight. It is wanton cruelty to bring them in to be gored; but that is a part of the show which the Spaniards love best. When a bull has killed five or six horses, as sometimes happens, and there is a delay in bringing in others, the people go mad, and yell at the president, ‘More horses! more horses!’

After the picadors have ridden out, the banderilleros commence on the bull. Their feat is a dangerous one. They have to go up to him and stick long darts, ornamented with coloured paper, into his neck. Both darts must be stuck to a nicety side by side. The banderillero must wait till the bull comes full tilt at him, stick the darts in, and slip aside. This is a feat requiring perfect aim, a quick eye, and a steady foot. While this is going on the toreros continue to draw the bull now this way and now that with their mantles. When, maddened by the darts hanging into his bleeding neck, he dashes at them, they have to run for their lives, and leap the barrier. By this time the poor beast has been baited and worried and chased and chivied until he is fairly tired. Now the bugle sounds for the last act, and all is intense excitement.

The espada advances to the president’s box, takes off his hat, and says ‘Señor President, here is to you, to your family, and all Spaniards.’ He then says that he will kill the bull. All the assistants retire. The espada takes a long Toledo sword and his red cloth, and advances to the bull. Man and beast are alone in the great ring. Intelligence and skill are pitted for the first time in the contest against brute force and passion. But daring, graceful, and clever as the matadors are, the chances are a thousand to one in their favour. The bull—poor beast—always runs at the cloth and not at the man. The matador’s real danger is a slip when running from the bull. But the toreros, or assistants, are all watching, and at the slightest symptom of danger they rush at the bull and turn him, or envelop his head with their cloaks. Fight he never so bravely, the bull is doomed. He must be killed—that is the rule of the game.

There are a score of names for the different passes and feints and tricks the matador performs with the bull for a few minutes, until he raises his sword in token that he intends to kill it. He baits the bull now this way and now that with the red cloth until he gets the animal to run fairly at him. Then he thrusts the long sword just between the left shoulder and the blade. If the thrust is true and well delivered, the bull falls on his knees. His proud head is raised in defiance for a moment, and then he falls over on his side dead. When the blow does not kill him, the butchery is completed by one of the toreros with the ‘puntilla.’ There are many ways in which the espada receives the last charge of the bull. Some are dangerous, and are only practised by the great masters of the art. Some of the matadors will even dispense with the red cloth, called in the parlance of the ring ‘muletta,’ and defy the bull with folded arms. These feats call forth deafening applause.

When the bull is dead, a team of gaily-bedecked mules enters, and drags out first the dead horses, and then the dead bull. The sand is raked over the pools and tracks of blood, and another bull is turned into the arena to go through the same performance. The second bull that I saw was furious at first, but was baited at last into absolute terror. Long before it came to the turn of the matador the poor brute was bellowing piteously, and trying to leap the barriers and escape. At last he got behind a dead horse, and, making a rampart of it, gored its carcass again and again. It took the whole staff five minutes to get him out into the arena to be killed.

After the bull-fight proper was over, I witnessed a curious spectacle. As the last of the four bulls fell to the ground dead, hundreds of the spectators leaped over the barriers into the arena and took off their cloaks. Then a young bull with knobs on its horns was turned loose among them for them to bait. Hundreds of lads became amateur toreros, and practised the art on the harmless animal. He knocked down a dozen and tossed one or two, to the intense amusement of the spectators. I left young Madrid thus amusing itself, and came out of the Plaza de Toros a wiser man as to bull-fights and a much sadder one. If I live fifty years in Spain, I never want to see such another cruel ‘game of blood.’

The bull-ring is the amusement of Spain, but the theatre is well patronized. I always study the theatres of foreign countries when I get a chance, and the Spanish theatre is one of the most curious I have seen. The Opera or Teatro Real is the principal, and is patronized by the aristocracy. Gayarré is the star there at present. The Teatro Español is devoted to the legitimate drama. The other theatres which play operettas, farces, and topical reviews are the Apolo, the Princesa, the Variedades, the Lara, the Eslava (so called after a priest who left the money to build it), and the Novedades. I will deal with this latter class first.

At nearly all Spanish theatres the performance commences at half-past eight, and is divided into four parts, each of which is called a ‘funcion.’ You pay for each of these—so much for entrance and so much for your seat. Thus, when you go to the Apolo, the performance commences at half-past eight with ‘La Gran Via.’ This is over at a quarter-past nine, and out you all go. A new audience now comes in and sees the first act of ‘Cadiz,’ an operetta, which terminates at ten. Out you all go again, and a fresh audience comes in and sees the second act of ‘Cadiz,’ which is over at a quarter to eleven. Out we all go again, and a fourth audience fills the theatre for another performance of ‘La Gran Via,’ which terminates about half-past eleven.

There is a prison scene in ‘La Gran Via.’ Several Vias are represented. One of them is called the ‘Via de la Liberdad,’ and it shows the side of a prison wall.

Some time before I arrived in Spain there had been a military revolt, and six sergeants who had taken a prominent part in the insurrection were confined in a State prison on the charge of high treason, but—owing to the notoriously lax discipline of Spanish prisons—the sergeants very shortly afterwards managed to make their escape, and eventually they succeeded in crossing the Pyrenees into France.

The escape of the sergeants is a standing joke among Spaniards of every shade of political opinion, and the scene in which the six sergeants are seen scudding along the prison wall, called the ‘Via de la Liberdad,’ is always received with tremendous roars of laughter, and it is probably the main cause of the great success of ‘La Fiesta de la Gran Via.’

One day a governor of a gaol who went to a bull-fight was astonished to see several of his prisoners who were under sentence of death enjoying themselves at the spectacle. There is always a golden key to a Spanish prison, and you can generally get a day or a night out if you are on good terms with the officials, and give your word of honour that you will come back again. I dare say a good many people will credit me with giving an extra throw to the hatchet, a stronger pull than usual at the long-bow; but the truth of my prison story is amply borne out by a sensational crime which has startled all Spain, shaken the Puerta del Sol to its foundation, brought lumps of the Generaliffe rolling down the Alhambra hill, caused the Alcazar of Seville to contemplate suicide in the Guadalquivir, and shaken up the coffins of the Kings of Spain in the gloomy Pantheon of the Escorial.

One night an old lady was found murdered in Madrid. She had been first killed, and then saturated with petroleum and set on fire, but the fire had gone out before it had done its work, and the wounds which had caused death were visible. I need not repeat all the incidents, but after suspicion falling on various persons, the crime has at last been brought home to the old lady’s son, who was supposed at the time the murder was committed to be a prisoner in close confinement in the Madrid gaol.

Here is a shilling shocker with a vengeance. The young gentleman had, it was proved, actually got out of prison with the connivance of the authorities, spent the night at liberty, and returned early in the morning very much the worse for liquor. Yet not a word was said by the officials of the place who knew the facts, because they knew it would get them into hot water. The story reads like an invention of the romancer, but it is only a series of facts. Spain still remains one of the most remarkable countries in Europe, and its manners and customs are more worthy of the ‘Arabian Nights’ than modern history.

It was at one of the minor theatres that I heard one of the performers imitate an actor with a peculiar voice and mannerism. The audience recognised the imitation, and encored it again and again. ‘Ah,’ said I to myself, ‘Spain has its Henry Irving. I must find him out.’ I made my inquiries, and the result was that I booked a stall to sit out a four-act Spanish drama at the Teatro Español written by one of the great dramatists of to-day, Don José Echegaray, and entitled ‘Haroldo el Normando.’ When the principal actor, Rafael Calvo, stepped upon the stage and gave off his first speech, I recognised the original of the caricature in a moment, and I knew by the reception and the bursts of applause that I was seeing Spain’s favourite tragedian. Calvo’s acting and declamation were splendid, but his voice was disagreeable; his gestures were natural, but his mannerisms were marked enough to enable me to give a good imitation of him after one visit to the theatre.

Calvo, who is only a little over thirty, is not a handsome man, but he is very intense and powerful, and is the great exponent of the modern natural school. His great rival is Antonio Vico, who is of the old and stilted school. Vico also has a bad voice, a defect from which many of the Spanish actors suffer.

At many points in the play the ladies wept and the gentlemen used their pocket-handkerchiefs. The mounting and dresses were beneath contempt, and there was not a line of comedy or a laugh from beginning to end of the play.

The audience was not a large one, considering the size and sumptuous embellishments of the theatre. I inquired of a Spanish friend why the legitimate drama was not better patronized. He told me that there was never a great house when Echegaray was the author. Ladies were afraid of him. His plays were so dreadfully miserable, they cried for a week after seeing them. He would spring scenes of horror on his audience without a moment’s preparation. Suddenly the scene would change, and you would see a mother weeping over two dead children on the stage. Nothing that could harrow the feelings was spared, and the author persisted in leaving everybody miserable at the end. After a new play by Echegaray everyone in Madrid asks, ‘Well, how many deaths are there in it?’ He is a grand writer, full of nervous force and poetic thought, but his plays make people so wretched that those who do not enjoy the luxury of a good cry stop away. Everybody says, ‘What a splendid writer!’ The newspapers laud him to the skies. The critics point to him as a man who maintains the prestige of Spanish dramatic literature. But the Spanish people, like the English people, decline to take out their theatrical amusement in essays and sermons delivered from the stage. They go to the theatre to be amused, not to study literature, and so, in spite of the abuse of the critics, who are some of them authors themselves of neglected ten-act tragedies in blank verse, the Spaniards flock to operettas, farces, comedies, reviews, medleys, pieces of any sort so long as they are laughable or interesting, and they leave the legitimate drama and the plays of misery by Señor Echegaray to the amateur and professional critics, who think, because they choose to sit at a theatre as in a church, that there should be no more cakes and ale.

But to return to the Spanish custom of taking a play at an act a night. Of course you may wish to see a play through in one evening. In this case you buy tickets for the second and third ‘funcion,’ and keep your seat. A man comes round between each act and collects the tickets for the next. Say you want to see the whole four ‘funcions’ out, you purchase four tickets. The ticket is a slip of paper—half of it is for your numbered seat, another half your entrance ticket. You must buy four entrance tickets and four tickets for your seat to entitle you to sit out the whole performance. The tickets are different colours, so that the checktakers may recognise at once for which funcion they are issued. The first audience comes in with green tickets, the second with pink, the third with white, and the fourth with yellow. The great draws at the present moment at three of the theatres are local reviews in rhyme, and full of topical allusions. The singing and dancing are good, and the points are taken up all over the house in a manner which would gladden the hearts of our burlesque writers. ‘La Fiesta de la Gran Via,’ which is being played at the Eslava, has beaten all previous records. I assisted at the 41,500th performance! Where are our long runs after that?

The piece is played twice a night, and on Sundays and fête days, of which there are scores in Spain, four times—twice at the morning and twice at the evening performance.

The anti-Conservative demonstrations in Madrid and other Spanish towns, which have been lately of such a violent character as to make some people think we were on the eve of another Spanish revolution, are really volcanic in their origin. The Spaniards are not a very demonstrative people. As a rule, if you offered them a perpetual pension they wouldn’t utter a shout or wave a hat. But every now and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, without any previous warning, Castilian pride and Moorish stolidity give way to the wildest excitement and the most utter disregard of the conventionalities of life. Be the offending party a Cabinet Minister, a bishop, or a bull, the Spaniard has but one cry, ‘Muerta!'—death! It does not mean all that it says. It is the language of the bull-ring carried into public life, and that is all. The bull-ring enriches Spanish language as the racecourse enriches the English.

Madrid is very much like a volcano on the eve of an eruption. Day and night there is a seething mass of cloaked gentry promenading the streets and squares in the eager hope of something turning up. The Puerta del Sol is as much alive at two in the morning as our Mansion House corner is at two in the afternoon. When the Spaniards go to bed is a mystery. Special editions of the evening papers come out in Madrid at 1 a.m., and small boys of the street-Arab type yell their ‘Speshal ‘Dishuns’ under your window till three, and if anything is on, until four. This all-night shouting and the ceaseless traffic no one who has the misfortune to sleep in a room looking on to the Puerta del Sol will ever forget. And the reason that Madrid is on the alert all night is that it is waiting, like Mr. Micawber, for something to turn up. When something does turn up to justify a row, the Madrileños make the most of it, and they yell ‘Muerta!’ just as a London mob would yell ‘Let him have it!’ ‘Muerta!’ is cried when the spectators in the bull-ring have had enough of the bull, and want him got rid of. ‘Muerta!’ shouted concerning a politician, a prelate, or a prince, means ‘Let him take his hook!’

That expression, by-the-by, though it looks like English slang, is quite a classical utterance. Its origin lies among the Roman gladiatorial games. A gladiator took his hook when the pole with a hook at the end of it was used to drag his dying or dead body from the arena.

The window of my sitting-room looks out upon the world-famed Puerta del Sol. Night and day a mighty, ever-changing crowd passes before me. Night and day the plashing fountain plays in the middle of the great public square. Night and day trains and ‘buses and mule-drawn waggons and beautiful landaus and phaetons and broughams and mail-coaches drawn by horses not to be surpassed in Hyde Park dash here and there. Night and day the hum of the idle, sauntering crowd rises and falls, and makes music to my ears.

Madrid is not a city. It is only a town. But such a town!—such streets! such shops! such horses! such carriages! such drives! such promenades! and over all the everlasting gaiety and insouciance of a people whose grand motto in all things mundane is this, ‘We have only one life—let us make the best of it and worry about nothing.’ Your true Spaniard never hurries and never worries and never frets. He inherits the dignity and the fatalism of the Moors, who have left their mark not only on the architecture of the cities, but upon the character of the citizens. If anything is a little beyond him, he folds his hands, smokes a cigarette, and waits for the dénouement.

Quietly and calmly, with a Spanish guide who walked everywhere so leisurely that I had to keep walking round and round him in order not to leave him miles behind, I saw everything that was to be seen in Madrid. I saw the royal palaces, I saw the bed—ay, and the mattress and bolster—on which King Alfonso died. I saw the royal stables and the royal carriages, I got a desperate fit of the blues in the Escorial—the eighth wonder of the world, the morbid outcome of a morbid mind; the last home of Spanish kings—that glowing palace on a barren rock, in which the monkish Philip died a hideous death of lingering agony, loathsome to himself and all around him, and in his last hours smitten by a gnawing terror that, after all, the royal road to heaven might not be over the dead bodies of countless victims slain ‘to the greater glory of God.’ I drove in the Prado, and saw grandees of Spain by the gross. I met the sisters of the King and ‘el Rey Chico,’ ‘the King Baby,’ with his royal mamma, all out for a drive, and I had all the scandals poured into my ear as great and titled ladies passed in their magnificent equipages.

Some years ago the ladies of Madrid took to driving high-stepping horses in mail phaetons, and even tooling showy teams through the principal thoroughfares. In the crowded traffic this was the cause of frequent accidents. The alcalde (clever man!) made it a regulation that no lady under thirty should drive, except in the Park. You may go all over Madrid now, and you don’t meet a single lady holding the reins. They are all under the regulation age.

Next to the bull-fights and the theatres, the things in which I have taken the greatest interest in Spain are the dances and the funerals. Both of these are so curious that I shall leave them until I have travelled with the reader a little further afield. One thing struck me in Madrid as it has struck me everywhere in Spain, and that is the way in which the Germans are monopolizing the trade of the country. Every hotel is crammed with German commercial travellers, and the shops are filled with German goods. The Germans I meet are excellent linguists. They speak Spanish fluently, and many of them can carry on a conversation in English and French as well. The Germans have displayed an enterprise in getting the trade of Europe into their hands which is truly remarkable. Their dealers and manufacturers visit the different countries, study the popular taste, and then produce articles which are as national as possible in character. For instance, half the fans and mantillas which are sold in Madrid and the large provincial towns are of German make. And yet they are absolutely Spanish. Many other things are of German make, and thousands of French and English tourists who carry away with them boxes full of specimen Spanish goods to present to their friends are really taking home things which have been imported from the Fatherland. As to cigars, the Germans supply three-fourths of the genuine Havannahs, even in Spanish seaports at which ships from Havannah constantly touch.

France and England also do a large trade with Spain in manufactured goods. But they supply only the articles which are purely French and English. It has been reserved for Germany to supply, not only German, but Spanish goods to Spain.

The cafés in Madrid are enormous and gorgeous in the extreme. The climate does not allow the guests to sit out of doors, but the saloons inside are so vast that in some of them a regiment might go through its manœuvres. The cafés are thronged night and day. Here the revolutions are hatched, here governments are overthrown. Chocolate is the great Spanish drink, but of an evening quite half the people have tea.

And such tea! It is a pale lemon colour when you pour it out, and consists principally of hot water. I noticed several ladies and gentlemen flavoured it with a small glass of rum. The tea I had in one of the grand cafés was rum without being flavoured. In fact, it was the rummest tea I ever tasted in my life.

One evening, hot and thirsty after seeing four ‘funcions’ at four different theatres, I was wondering what I could drink, when I saw a café in the Calle de Azenal that had a large advertisement outside, ‘English refreshments.’ I rushed to the door to read the list of English refreshments that was displayed on a card outside. I only read the top line, and that was enough.

This was the top line: ‘Zurzaparilla!’ One travels and learns. I never knew before that sarsaparilla was the national drink of the Briton.

I stayed at an excellent French hotel in Madrid, but I got tired of the French table d’hôte. I wanted to eat as the Spaniards eat. One evening I persuaded a Spanish gentleman to take me to a real Spanish middle-class restaurant, and let me taste the fare of the country. The Spanish are a frugal and moderate race. Two or three dishes and dessert—that is their dinner. There is no long bill of fare as among the French.

The restaurant was a quiet room on the ground-floor of a modest-looking house. There were one or two families and several single gentlemen dining. The women wore handkerchiefs on their heads and shawls over their shoulders. People dropped in, had a soup and a dish of meat, an orange and some nuts, and went away satisfied. Our bill of fare was more extravagant, but it created a sensation. The landlord and all the waiters came in turns to look at the extraordinary Englishmen who had such gigantic appetites.

Here is the exact menu. We began with olives and pickled pimientos and guindelias and chilis. These were the hors d'œuvres. Then cigarettes. Then we had an ordinary thin soup, followed by cigarettes; then came the great national dish, called cocido. If you have a good dish of cocido (pronounced cothido, because of the Spanish lisp given to the c before certain vowels) you have a good deal for your dinner. It is a savoury stew of chicken, potatoes, sausage, bacon, and white beans, all boiled up with pieces of beef. In most Spanish families this is the everyday dish. Of course the poorer classes have to leave out some of the ingredients, except on festive occasions. In Andalusia the peasants will sit round a huge panful of their version of this article. It is made according to their means, and often vegetables are plentiful, but the pieces of meat few and far between, and each man ladles it out by spoonfuls into his mouth. Plates are dispensed with.

The foreigner who is suddenly confronted with a huge dish of cocido and politely requested to help himself is in some difficulty. He takes a spoonful at hazard. The waiter still stands at his elbow. ‘The señor has only taken beans.’ Again you make a dash with the spoon and secure something else. The waiter stares, but does not move away. ‘The señor has only taken sausage.’ The señor, confused, requests the waiter to assist him; and then the process, though slow, is interesting. A spoonful of beans on the plate; then, selected with the greatest care; a piece of chicken; then a patient search for a slice of sausage buried under a mound of cabbage; then the cabbage itself; then a minute devoted to a voyage of discovery in search of the nicest piece of beef; then an exploration in search of a succulent morsel of bacon; then a spoonful of the potatoes; and then, over all, an extra spoonful of the beautiful gravy. I timed my waiter, and he took six minutes and a half to help me to cocido. When the dish passes down a table d’hôte it takes about an hour to go round. It is for this reason that the Spaniards help themselves all together at the same time from the common dish.

The cocido was excellent. Well cooked, it is a dinner for a king. I intend to introduce it into England upon my return. But I am afraid it will give rise to a good deal of ill-feeling in families. Somebody will get all the slices of the sausage, and then there will be recriminations and angry words. We have neither the patience nor the politeness of the Spaniards; and cocido is a dish that requires a good deal of both.

The next item after cigarettes was a Spanish salad. This salad is prepared in a peculiar way, and spread out upon bread into which the oil and vinegar have been allowed to soak. This, too, was excellent. Then more cigarettes; then a cheese made of honey and cream, and several other ingredients which require to be taken on trust; and then, after more cigarettes, some ‘angel’s hair,’ which is really a preparation of orange-rind very thinly shredded. More cigarettes; then an orange, raisins of Malaga, and almonds and Barcelona nuts, dried and salted, and delicious. I am so enchanted with these ‘almindras’ that I have made all my boxes overweight with them. The wines with this feast were Valdepeñas—a red wine made from grapes grown on the rocky plains around Madrid—and Jerez, which, of course, is sherry. I have been to Jerez lately, and, having seen the extent of the vineyards, I beg to add that, though Jerez is, of course, sherry, it does not follow that all sherry is Jerez—very, very far from it—often thousands of miles from it. And we wound up with more cigarettes.

To finish the evening in a real Spanish way, after going to a rather low Spanish café to see the real Spanish dancing, we had, before retiring to rest, ‘Dos chocolates con pica-tostes'; and that, if you please, is two cups of thick chocolate, with square fingers of bread beautifully fried in olive-oil. And we weren’t ill.

CHAPTER V.
SEVILLE.

I spent a pleasant week in Madrid, and I then went on to Seville. On three days a week there is an express train which does the journey of 350 miles in fifteen hours. This is fortunate, because the ordinary trains take twenty-four, and even this is fast in comparison with the trains on less frequented lines. The express journey was not without its interesting features. We stopped now and again for fifteen minutes or half an hour. When we stopped, everybody got out of the train and went into the buffet—passengers, guards, engine-drivers, porters, and all. We all sat down together, and ate and drank together; and then we all smoked cigarettes together round the fire. When it was time to start, we got up, stretched ourselves, and leisurely strolled back to the train, the guards and the engine-driver and the stoker being generally the last to turn out. It was very friendly and very nice; but as these stoppages of half an hour occur about every twenty minutes, the English traveller, unaccustomed to spend a day and a night in conversing with the engine-driver in a station waiting-room, begins to get impatient.

Our ‘civil guards,’ of course, went with us, their moustaches fiercely twisted and their rifles loaded. We still want this sort of protection on long railway journeys over lonely plains in Spain, because the brigands are not quite done away with yet. Only last year they stopped and robbed a train. The way in which the robbery is carried out is this: The brigands signal to the engine-driver to stop, and he does so, being generally ‘in’ with the brigands. Then these gentlemen, called in Spanish ‘Salteadores de caminos,’ or road jumpers, approach the carriage, raise their hats to the passengers, and, in the most polite language, request them to give up their money and jewels. The ‘guardias civiles’ are stopped from firing at the robbers by the affrighted passengers, as the rascals have previously explained that if they are fired at, they will shoot at the passengers in return.

The chief of the brigands last year addressed the passengers in these terms:

‘Ladies and Gentlemen,—Please deliver up your money and valuables of every description. We do not wish to put you to the indignity of a search, but shall rely upon your honour. But as soon as you tell us you have given up everything we shall search one passenger of each class. If upon either we find a single coin or a single valuable, we shall shoot one passenger in each compartment. Ladies and gentlemen, do not hurry yourselves. Our time is yours.’

You can imagine that, under these circumstances, there is very little kept back. The passengers beg and pray of each other to conceal nothing. As soon as a complete surrender has been made, the brigands raise their hats again, and bid the passengers farewell in these words, ‘Vaya ustedes con Dios!'—‘May you go with God!'—and, as the train moves off, they add, with beautiful and simple piety, ‘And may we all meet again some day in God’s big parlour!’

These dignified and solemn Spanish salutations are universal among the people, and are never omitted. Your beggar in Spain is a gentleman, and you address him always in formal and courteous language. ‘Brother,’ you say, when he importunes you, ‘may God put it into your heart to deprive me of the pleasure of your society!’ To your waiter, to the servant, to the boy who blacks your boots, your language must never be curt. At the table d’hôte in Spain, high-born gentlemen and the officers talk as much with the waiter as they do with each other. He joins in the general conversation; and I have heard an ex-Spanish Minister gravely discussing the political situation with the waiter who was handing round the dishes. Sometimes the guests agreed with the waiter, and sometimes with the ex-Minister.

A word about the accommodation for travellers in second-rate Spanish towns off the beaten track before I hurry away from the gayest and brightest capital in all Europe, and go on to Seville. English travellers are frightened from visiting many small Spanish towns by tales of bad accommodation, vile cooking, and uncivilized ways. My personal experience proves the contrary. In many places off the beaten track I was excellently housed and fed, and every Spaniard with whom I came in contact put himself out of his way to make my path one of roses. But I didn’t walk about rooms with my hat on; I didn’t cross the high altar in churches without bowing my knee; and I didn’t turn my nose up at all the dishes, and say ‘Faugh!’ and I didn’t call the servants and the proprietor ‘d.f.'s’ because they didn’t understand English. The English who come abroad do much to bring about the incivility with which they are sometimes treated. The off-hand, imperious, insular manner is not understood in a country where the beggars address each other as ‘Your excellency’ and ‘Your lordship.’ Instead of finding fault with everything Spanish, praise everything, say you like everything, and flatter instead of abusing your hosts, and you will find the Spaniards, from the highest to the lowest, vying with each other as to which can show you the greatest courtesy.

The courtesy of the servants in Spanish hotels is wonderful. Every waiter, every chambermaid, rises when you pass, and bows and remains standing till you are out of sight. Your coachman remains bareheaded while you get into your carriage. In country places all the drivers you meet on the road raise their hats and wish you all that is good.

In the best hotels a staff of servants sit on sofas on each landing waiting to attend to the summons of the guests. If you walk up and down your corridor for half an hour, every time you pass that sofa the servants will rise and remain standing till you have passed.

In little out-of-the-way towns at table d’hôte, if a lady comes into the room all the gentlemen at the table rise and bow to her, and remain standing until she is seated. When the table d’hôte is over, the men as they rise bow to those who still remain seated, and, in courtly phraseology, lay themselves at the feet of the company.

At one table d’hôte in a little town I was astonished to see a gentleman sit down in his hat and cloak, and keep them on. I made inquiries, and found that he was a Castilian grandee, and it was his privilege to remain covered. The hat in Spain is the seat of dignity. That is why you give your visitor’s hat the armchair of honour when he calls upon you.

Seville is a place one longs to see until one has seen it, and then one wonders why one wanted to see it so much. It is beautiful. I am a Philistine, a Goth, a Vandal, a dreadful creature generally, but I am always willing to admit beauty where it exists. I don’t prostrate myself and worship simply because I am told it is the proper thing to do, but anything that I like I become enthusiastic over. I can’t become enthusiastic over Seville. It is quaint and old and picturesque and pretty and lordly and interesting, and all that sort of thing, but you soon get tired of it. The climate has something to do with this, perhaps. The energy goes out of you in Seville. You saunter and put your hands in your pockets, and so in time the very laziness of the life begins to bore you. If I hadn’t heard so much about Seville it is quite possible I should have been enchanted with it. But I have heard its praises sung on the top note all my life, and so I was disappointed.

The people and the patios are the most interesting things in Seville. Artists have painted the men and women of Andalusia in their national costumes for countless ages, so that everyone is familiar with them. Comic operas and ballets by the score have shown us the dark-eyed lasses, with the coquettish comb and the mantilla, and the bright flowers in their hair, casting melting glances from behind a fan. And the songs about the Guadalquivir would bind up into a very big volume. Every Englishman is therefore prepared beforehand for Seville. I was. I got out at the station, and got into an omnibus that rattled my bones over awful stones, and jerked me up in the air, and threw me down on the floor, and reduced me to a living pulp; and, as soon as I was something between a jam and a jelly, I began to look about me.

Seville is built on the regular Moorish system. Narrow streets and houses close together to keep out the fierce heat of the sun. We go full speed through streets that leave only half an inch on each side of the bus. Foot passengers dash into doorways to shelter until we have passed. We come to streets so narrow that the horses could not pass through, let alone the bus; and so we dive up here and dive down there, and describe a circle, in order to arrive at our hotel. There are certain streets that carriages go up, and certain streets that they come down. Nothing could pass! And there are no footways. An unskilful driver who goes an inch to the right or the left chips a piece out of his vehicle by knocking it against a house.

But one thing strikes the first comer and rivets his attention. Every house, small and large, has a lovely gate of ironwork as delicate as lace, through which one sees a beautiful inner patio or marble courtyard filled with waving trees and beautiful plants. Often in the centre a splendid fountain plays. Seville is an old city of the Moors. Their handiwork is everywhere. In these houses that one passes the Moors lived their Eastern life before they were driven out by the reconquest of Spain, and so beautiful is the climate, so clear the atmosphere, that everything stands to-day just as it stood hundreds of years ago. The Moor is everywhere in this part of Spain. The people still dance the Moorish dances and sing the Moorish songs, and the blood of the Moors still lingers in their veins, the features of the Moors still survive, and make the faces that one meets full of Eastern grace and beauty.

The country all round Seville is a garden of Eden. The orange-trees, the palm-trees, and the almond-trees are everywhere. The hedges are the prickly pear and the cactus. The landscape is African in its luxuriance, and the golden sunshine floods the land with glory. But the roads! Oh, ye gods, the roads! They ought to be impossible roads; but we drove over them. They are in ruts a foot deep; they are in holes in which a man might hide himself. They have not been swept for centuries. The mud that was in heaps in the days of the Moors remains in heaps still. The dogs and cats who died by the roadside in the days of the Moors have not yet been buried. Once when I was in Seville it rained all night. The next day we drove through a sea of liquid mud. Even the roadways in front of the palaces of the rich are in great holes and full of ponds. Carriages break down, horses break their legs, visitors disappear down holes in the roadway. The Sevillians regret the circumstances; they repair the carriages, buy new horses, make new friends, but they never repair the roads. Some day the only way of getting about Seville will be by balloon. Even now it is the safest way. So much has been done for Seville by the past Moors; the present burgesses might at least keep the roads in repair.

The Guadalquivir! Another of my lost illusions. Poets have sung it from a distance—the poet who walks upon its bank holds his nose. The Guadalquivir, out of the poetry books and the songs and the romances, is a commonplace, dirty stream, about as romantic as the Thames at Barking Creek, and not so clean.

The people and the patios and the climate make Seville, and the Santa Semaña—the Holy Week!—brings thousands and thousands of people to the marmalade city. It is a week of magnificent processions—a week of such pomp and circumstance and magnificence and show as to be indescribable. All the winter long people come to Seville because it is said to be a beautiful place. During the month of the Santa Semaña they cram into Seville to see a sight which no other town in the world can show.

English swarm in Seville. At the Hotel of the Tower of Babel we sit down 180 to table d’hôte. The eighty are English and American. We speak all languages at this hotel. All day long it is a babel of French, English, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Swedish, Dutch, and Portuguese. We have magnificent entertainments at dinner-time. One evening a band of fifty ‘Estudiantina’ play and sing and dance for our amusement. Another evening we have professors of the guitar who serenade us. But this great caravansera of foreigners spoils Seville for me. I might be at a big hotel anywhere except in Spain. Everything is thoroughly un-Spanish. All around one hears English and French, and people dress and give themselves airs, and bring the customs and manners of London and Paris and St. Petersburg to Seville, and so spoil it. It knocks the romance out of the place to hear at every street corner, ‘Hullo, old fellow; how are you?’ and ‘Oh, Jane, did you see that funny old lady?’ or ‘Bai Jove, what a doosid pretty girl in that balcony!’ There are so many places in Spain which are ugly and purely Spanish, that one feels annoyed to come to a place which is pretty but cosmopolitan.

The great tobacco factory at Seville is one of the first sights the stranger is taken to see. It requires a certain amount of courage for a bashful man to run the gauntlet of 6,500 young ladies. Everybody in Spain smokes cigarettes. Little boys begin at the age of eight, and from that time the cigarette is rarely absent from a Spaniard’s lips. Many of them die smoking. The consumption of cigarettes is naturally enormous, and the bulk are manufactured in Seville. The Government factory gives daily employment to about 7,000 people, and of these only a hundred or two are men.

When you enter the enormous rooms crowded with girls dressed in bright colours, the coup d'œil is striking in the extreme. In one immense low-vaulted room there are 1,500 girls. They sit in endless rows—about twenty girls to a row—on either side of the room, all at little tables, all rolling cigarettes. There is a blaze and blur of colour, a babel of tongues. Every girl has a gay handkerchief about her neck—every girl has a bright flower stuck in her hair. All along the walls hang the gay outdoor dresses of the little cigarette-makers. As I walk, blushing and nervous, down an endless avenue of flashing eyes, I grow almost giddy. It is a sea of women’s faces, an undulating ocean of flower-decked heads. One has to pick one’s way carefully down the central avenue, for it is blockaded all along the line with cradles. The married cigarette-makers are allowed to bring their babies with them to the factory. They rock the cradle with one foot, while their busy fingers roll the cigarette.

‘Silence!’ is called by the forewoman as the visitor passes down the lines, but there is a ‘chut-chut’ every second from some dark-eyed wench who points to a cradle and holds out her hand. It is the habit of visitors to bestow occasional coppers on the babies, and so all the young mothers are on the alert for the visitors’ charity.

The girls earn good wages. At many of the tables whole families are working together. But the hours are long, and the atmosphere awful. The damp, warm odour of the tobacco in the long, low-roofed rooms is in itself almost stupefying. But there is no ventilation, and the atmosphere is absolutely indescribable. Many of the girls smoke cigarettes at their work. I was very glad to light one myself long before I had done the round of the factory.

I have said that cigarette-smoking is universal in Spain. Nowhere does the habit strike the foreigner more forcibly than at a funeral. Funerals in Spain are conducted in a manner which is in the highest degree original. When you die you are got rid of as soon as possible. The Spaniards have the same horror of death surroundings as the Italians, but they go a great deal further. As quickly as possible—sometimes within an hour—the body is placed in an elaborate coffin made of metal, and painted to imitate marble. Some of these ‘caskets’ are smothered in gilt ornaments of a most elaborate character. All sizes are kept ready at the great funeral establishments. The coffins open lengthways. The lid is on hinges, and is locked with a key. The poorer people are buried in wooden coffins, covered with various designs in coloured ribbons. Children’s coffins are made in white and blue, and are decorated like a bon-bon box. Coffins of this description are sold almost everywhere in the South. You see them hanging up outside the shops by dozens.

I went over the premises of one of the biggest undertaking concerns in Spain. It is a public company, and is called ‘La Funeraria.’ I never saw such magnificence in my life. Some of the funeral cars are built in the style of the great gilt and glass cars which figure in a circus procession through a country town. The drivers and footmen are dressed in gorgeous liveries that make you blink to look at them. Some of the liveries that I was shown cost over £200 each. They positively blazed with gold. A grand first-class funeral, with a retinue of footmen and officials, is a perfect Lord Mayor’s show in itself.

As a rule, the corpse, even when so magnificently conducted to its last home, is unattended by any relatives. Spaniards finish with their dead when the church ceremony is over. Few corpses are accompanied to the cemetery except by the undertaker’s men. But in ordinary cases the coffin is placed in a yellow, open car, and driven up to the cemetery by a gentleman in a short jacket and peaked cap. The driver smokes his cigarette and cracks his whip as he hums his favourite tune. I have seen dozens of these ordinary funerals in Spain, and they have always filled me with amazement. The ridiculous always lives next door to the sublime. The grotesque and the horrible are first cousins. More than once I have with difficulty restrained myself from smiling at a Spanish interment, so utterly out of keeping with English notions of decorum has the final ceremony been.

I will describe two interments that I witnessed in one day at the great cemetery at Seville. Four little barefooted boys arrive at the cemetery gates. Between them they carry a little blue and white coffin. They jog along, chatting and laughing, up the long avenue of trees. Presently they see something which attracts their attention—a bird in a tree. Down they drop the coffin by the roadside, and off they scamper across the grass to the tree. They pick up stones and begin to throw them at the bird. In the process they quarrel about something, and two of the boys have a fight. In the meantime the coffin lies in the roadway. I walk up to it, and through the glass let into the lid I see the dead child’s face. It has been dead perhaps twelve hours, so the features are unchanged, and it appears to be calmly sleeping. Several people pass me; no one takes any notice of the coffin in the road. One old gentleman nearly tumbles over it, and swears. It is evidently nothing unusual.

Presently these ragged boys, having arranged their little difference, return, and pick up the coffin. Two of them have lighted cigarettes. They carry their burthen right across the cemetery to a little house, where two or three men with brass numbers on their caps are smoking cigarettes. Here they show a paper, and one of the men, picking up a spade, tells the boys to follow him. Off they go, jogging the coffin now this way and now that, and I follow them.

We come to a long line of brick vaults. Some are empty; some are filled up to the top with what I presume to be mould. The gravedigger turns over the loose earth with his spade, and strikes a coffin here and there. The vault is too full. He moves on to another bricked square, pushes his spade in, and says there is just room. He digs a little hole and lays the coffin flush with the top of the brickwork. Then he throws a few spadefuls of earth over it from a mound close by, and the ceremony is finished. There are thousands of these bricked squares in the cemetery, and each contains a score of coffins. There is no stone over the top, only the loose brown earth. Some of them are so full that the earth has to be piled up to cover the coffin, and thus the coffin is actually above ground.

This system of burying in bricked squares saves a lot of trouble. The graves are always ready, and the dead can be brought to the cemetery and put away at once. There is no necessity to order or select beforehand. To understand this system you must see a Spanish cemetery. No written words can convey a correct impression of its general peculiarities.

The next funeral arrives as I am leaving the cemetery. A car, driven by a man smoking a cigarette, comes up. It is followed by a cab, from which alights an old gentleman, also smoking a cigarette. The car pulls up at the gate of the ‘depository,’ a little house in the grounds arranged for the reception of people who have died too late to be buried that day. The guardian of this house, cigarette in mouth, flings open the doors, speaks to the gentleman, and then calls for somebody to come. A man with a cigarette in his mouth now approaches. He and the car-driver lift out the coffin and carry it into the house and lay it on the trestles. They then light a candle at the head and foot, and come out and shut the door. Off drives the car, the man lighting another cigarette, and the gentleman to whom the corpse belongs strolls across the cemetery with the gravedigger to choose ‘his place.’ The gravedigger turns up a little earth in one brick square, and then in another. ‘Too full,’ says the gentleman, puffing his cigarette. He goes from square to square, and pokes at the loose earth with his stick. At last he settles on a square which is only half full. ‘That will do,’ he says, and then he returns to his cab and drives away.

I make inquiries of the keeper of the ‘depository.’ The body inside the coffin is the gentleman’s wife. She died last night. She will be buried to-morrow morning. ‘Will the gentleman return to see her buried?’ ‘Oh, no; he has finished. He has left her here. The rest concerns us!’ We find it difficult to understand this leaving the dead to be buried without ceremony, and without a friendly watcher; but the Spaniards think nothing of it. They bid their dead good-bye with the last prayer. The interment is no ceremony at all to them. The dead are hurried out of the house as soon as possible. Sometimes they are sent to the undertaker’s ‘depository’ within a couple of hours of their decease, and the friends see no more of them. This, with the Southern horror of a corpse, one can understand. But the cigarette-smoking of hearse-drivers, cemetery attendants, and gravediggers while handling the coffin, strikes the foreign looker-on as, to say the least of it, lacking in ordinary respect for the dead.

In many parts of Spain the death ceremonies are peculiar. The corpse is elaborately dressed in its best, and has its hair beautifully done, and a pair of new boots put on its feet. It is then got rid of as soon as possible, and all the furniture in the room is taken out and sold, or given away. Everything that can remind the family of the deceased is removed. A notice of the death is not only inserted in the newspapers, but in some cases placarded on the walls; and you are requested to go to such and such a church on such and such a day, when a mass will be said for the repose of the dead person’s soul.

Among the poor there is a very free-and-easy way of getting their dead buried. One day, outside a great cemetery, I came upon three common coffins lying on the ground near the gate. Seeing that the coffins were occupied, I started back in horror, and asked what, in Heaven’s name, such an exhibition meant. ‘Oh,’ said my Spanish friend, ‘they are poor people who cannot afford to be buried yet. There is a little fee to be paid. Someone will come by presently, and pay for the coffins to be put away as an act of charity.’

Unburied coffins are bad enough, but what do you think of dead children hung up outside the cemetery gates, waiting for some kind soul to pay for them to be put into the earth? The sight is not uncommon in the South of Spain, where every form and shape of beggary is rampant. Sometimes the friends of a small corpse, instead of asking charity, will smuggle it into the cemetery hidden under a cloak; and, when no one is looking, drop it into one of the big square graves I have told you about, and kick a little loose earth over it. There are plenty of uncoffined dead under the loose earth in the great cemetery of Seville.

Burials alive are far more common in hot countries, where the burial takes place within twenty-four hours after death, than they are in England, where one gets, as a rule, a week’s grace. In Spain the body is frequently removed to the undertaker’s shop a few hours after death. In one of the largest of these establishments in Madrid, some years ago, an extraordinary sight was witnessed. A gentleman was brought in his ‘casket’ one afternoon, and placed in the room set apart for that branch of the business. The proprietor lived over his premises, and on this especial evening was giving a grand ball. When the ball was at its height, a gentleman in full evening dress suddenly joined the company. He danced with the wife of the undertaker, and he danced with the undertaker’s daughter, and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself.

The undertaker thought he knew his face, but did not like to be rude and ask him his name; but by-and-by all the guests departed, and the strange gentleman was the only one left. ‘Shall I send for a cab for you?’ said the host at last. ‘No thank you,’ replied the gentleman; ‘I’m staying in the house.’ ‘Staying in the house!’ exclaimed the undertaker; ‘who are you, sir?’ ‘What, don’t you know me? I’m the corpse that was brought in this afternoon.’ The undertaker, horrified, rushed to the mortuary-room and found the coffin empty. His wife and daughter had been dancing with a corpse. An explanation, of course, followed. The gentleman, who had only been in a trance, had suddenly recovered, and hearing music and revelry above, and having a keen sense of humour, had got out of his coffin (the Spanish coffin closes with a lid, which is only locked just previous to interment) and joined the festive party. He was quite presentable, as in Spain the dead are generally buried in full evening dress.

Writing about funerals in Spain reminds me of a curious ceremony in connection with the burial of Spanish kings. The Pantheon in the Escorial is their last home. Here they lie in splendid marble sarcophagi in great niches, and you can walk about and see them all. Alfonso’s sarcophagus is empty as yet. The late King’s body lies on a table in an adjoining chamber—a chamber called El Pudridero, which is really a place where the royal bodies are left to undergo the natural process of decay which at last fits them to be placed in the ornamental arrangement in the Pantheon. The ceremony to which I referred above took place at the late King’s funeral. The body was brought in great state from Madrid to the Escorial, a distance of thirty miles. The ‘intendant’ of the royal palace was in charge of it. When the procession reached that gate of the Escorial which is only opened to admit a dead sovereign, the procession halted. The ‘intendant’ then went to the coffin and opened it, and exclaimed in a loud voice, ‘Don Alfonso!’ then again still louder, ‘Don Alfonso!’ and again, ‘Don Alfonso!’ He then turned to the officials, and said, ‘Don Alfonso does not answer; he is dead!’ The coffin was locked again, and the King passed on to his last home.

A note or two before I leave Seville. When I arrived in Seville, before seeing the sights, I went to a barber’s shop to have my head shampooed and to be shaved, and to be generally put straight after fifteen hours in the train. I asked my ‘Figaro’ if he was the Barber of Seville. He shook his head deprecatingly, and said, ‘No; but he was one of them.’ I explained to him that I wanted to know if he was the immortal Barber of Seville—that it was a mild joke. He said there were so many barbers in Seville. He had never heard of Count Almaviva, but he knew a Rosina. She was working in the great tobacco factory of Seville, and was very pretty. I lost my patience. I cried, ‘Great heavens, man! you are a barber of Seville, and you never heard of the Barber of Seville who is in an opera known all over the world?’ The man thought for a little while, and then exclaimed, ‘Ah! I know what you mean now. They show a shop to tourists where a barber once lived who did something. But I didn’t know it was true about him. The guides here make so many stories for the tourists!’

I left the Barber of Seville sad and downcast. I had expected that all the time he was shaving me he would be singing the best-known airs of the opera. And he didn’t even know who Figaro was!

One more disillusion awaited me in Seville. One morning the waiter brought me for my breakfast some marmalade. ‘Ah!’ I exclaimed, ‘Seville—Seville oranges! Of course, the marmalade here is excellent.’ ‘Yes, señor,’ replied the waiter; ‘it is considered a great delicacy in Seville, because we cannot get it here. This is the best Scotch marmalade from London!’

The Andalusian dances are quite as interesting as the funerals. To see the dances in perfection you have, when there is no fête or country festival on, to go to the cafés chantants, and these establishments in Spain are only frequented by a low class of people. My companion and I put our dignity in our pockets and went to the cafés, but we had a slight difficulty in explaining to the young ladies of the establishments that we were there to see them dance, and not to drink bottles of Malaga and talk Spanish to them. The dancing of the Andalusian girls is well worth putting up with a little bad company to see. There is a good deal of the Oriental movement of the hips and arms in it; in fact, both the song and the dance of the South are Moorish, but there is also a grace and a coquettishness of a purely Spanish character. When a man and woman dance together with the castanets, and dance well, there is no prettier sight to be seen.

The men are all good dancers. The great dancer of Seville at the present moment is a butcher, one José Fernandez, surnamed ‘El Chibo’ (the little lamb). He has a fine shop on the Plaza, and is very well to do. Unfortunately he could not dance for me because he had been having a political discussion with a friend, and had received by way of argument two bullets in the chest, and so was confined to the hospital. ‘El Chibo’ is also one of the leading figures in the great procession of the Holy Week. He takes the character of a Roman general. For this occasion he has had made, at his own expense, a new and beautiful costume, for which he has paid the trifling sum of 15,000 pesetas—say, £600. You may guess that ‘El Chibo,’ the dancing butcher of Seville, is not a poor man.

The gipsy dancing of Granada is different from the Andalusian dancing. As it was not convenient for me to climb up the Alhambra Hill at night and sit in a gipsy cave, I had the gipsy dancers brought down to a house in the town by their captain, and paid for a private performance. The guide-books say that it is a ‘disgusting exhibition.’ It isn’t exactly the sort of thing a girl would take her mother to see; but ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’ The gipsies dance ‘Old Africa’ and their other dances without any thought of evil. They are not refined, and many of the ‘figures’ are coarse and suggestive, but the general effect is striking, and dramatic, and picturesque. After the real Moorish dances of Africa and the Spanish dances of Andalusia, these gipsy dances of Granada are not worth going much out of one’s way to see. But the gipsies themselves are interesting, and the old gipsy captain plays the guitar like an angel. I tried to carry on a conversation in Romany with them, and I found that, taking into account the difference of the Spanish and the English pronunciation of the same word, they understood me very well indeed. I stayed with the gipsies and their captain till eleven on Saturday night, and on Sunday, at their special invitation, I went up the hills and spent an hour in their home—a cave burrowed right into the mountain, and fitted up in an exceedingly primitive style. The chief of the party I spent Sunday with is nearly seventy-six, and a hale and hearty old Gitano still. He told me that many years ago he danced with his wife before the Prince of Wales, and he asked me if he was King of England yet, if he was married, and how many children he had. I gave him the desired information, and then he asked me, if I saw the Prince of Wales when I went back to England, to give his best respects to his Royal Highness. I promised that I would, should the opportunity occur. I regret to say that up to the present moment it has not.

CHAPTER VI.
GRANADA AND THE ALHAMBRA AND CORDOBA.

The journey from Seville to Granada is a fearful affair. The distance is only 179 miles, but it takes all day. Directly you come into the province of Granada the train is besieged with beggars. At every station ragged boys leap up on the steps of the carriages and whine for alms. When you arrive at the terminus, beggars by dozens pounce upon you. You get into an omnibus to go to the town (I selected a real Spanish hotel to escape from the English), and you are rattled over stones so huge that they throw the omnibus up several feet from the ground. Suddenly you stop. You look out and find yourself in the centre of a dirty, half-lighted square. You are in the middle of the roadway. Round you dance dozens of weird forms with bare legs and arms, clad in ragged cloaks. The door is opened, and you are requested to descend. You look in vain for a hotel, and before you can ask a question your luggage is thrown off the roof into the mud. The dozen beggars scream and shout and gesticulate. One seizes your rugs, another your portmanteau, another your bag. In vain you protest and shriek to the bus-driver. In self-defence you rush after the procession of beggars who have seized your property. Then you see that they are wading through the mud on to a pavement, and that there is a hotel in the distance. The roads of Granada are so constructed that a deep ditch separates the road from the pavement. This causes everybody in a carriage to be set down in the middle of the roadway.

I followed the beggars who had seized my luggage, and found myself presently in the hotel. Here the beggars grouped themselves round me until I had been given a number, and then up they filed barefooted and dirty to my sleeping apartment. The hotel people didn’t say anything; so I presumed it was usual for the porterage of the hotel to be performed in this way. A handful of coppers relieved me of my attendants, and I counted my packages and found them all safe; but it will be a long time before I forget being turned out on a dark night in the middle of a dark square, and having all my belongings seized and carried off by the beggars of Granada.

Granada is the Alhambra! But for the Alhambra, Granada would be left to the gipsies and the mendicants. But the Alhambra makes the town the Mecca of all travelling Christians. To behold the palace on the hill, the ‘red fortress,’ the last stronghold of the Moors, it is worth while enduring a good deal more than the persecutions of the most degraded population in all Spain. As one wanders through these world-renowned ruins and gazes in admiration and awe at the glorious handiwork of a race that was swept out of Spain hundreds of years ago, one pinches one’s self to see if it is a dream or a reality. One walks upon enchanted ground. Here the genii have been at work. It is too utterly prosaic to imagine that this fairy palace was built by mortal hands. For my own part, I don’t believe it. I am as sure as I am of anything that one day a gentleman out of ‘The Arabian Nights’ was sojourning in Granada and he rubbed a ring, or muttered an incantation, and a djin appeared, and, after a short conversation, the palace and fortress of the Alhambra rose from the ground. I don’t dispute the fact that it was afterwards inhabited by mortals, that here ‘King Boabdil’ and his brave garrison were starved out, and yielded the keys to the Christian conquerors, and so passed away for ever. The splendid marble tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella stand in the Royal Chapel of Granada, and relics of the last defeat of the Moors are everywhere around. Even the banner that the Christians bore as they entered the gates of the Alhambra on January 2, 1492, still hangs, faded and tattered, in a glass case in the chapel. And near it are the crown and sceptre of their most Catholic Majesties; and in a little corner, all by itself, is a golden casket, once the property of a gentleman named Columbus, who has been handed down to posterity in connection with a yarn about cracking eggs to make them stand upright, and is also the hero of other American stories. All these things are solid and substantial realities; but the Alhambra itself is the airy fabric of a vision, an artist’s fantasy, a poet’s dream, a——

I am checked in my rhapsody by the remembrance of what I heard as I wandered through these halls of heavenly beauty, and floated back along the centuries until I was a Moor myself, and formed one of the proud Sultan’s glittering train, and lived in the Alhambra in all its pristine glory of Moorish arch and marble pillar, its masonry of transparent lace-work, its softened hues of red and blue lit up with glowing gold, its glistening Oriental tiles, its pomp, its splendour, its majesty and might. And while I dreamed, and stood aside in the beautiful Court of Lions to let the veiled beauties of the harem pass with their escort of negro guards, a voice broke in upon my dreams, and brought me with an earthquake shock back from the dead centuries to the pulsing, breathing ‘time by the clock'—and this is what the voice said: ‘H’m! it is rather like the place in Leicester Square, isn’t it?’

With a cry of horror I looked up and beheld an ulster and a billycock and a red guide-book. And presently one of the officials of the Alhambra approached the ulster and the billycock, and showed it a book of photographs of other ulsters and billycocks, taken on the spot, leaning against the pillars of the Alhambra. Would the gentleman and his friend like to be taken in the Alhambra? They would—and they were. I fled from the scene of desecration. Ulsters and billycocks, with their hands in their pockets, leaning against the marble pillars of the Alhambra! O Moors, that wrought this fairy fabric, beautiful for ever, and to be hallowed until all taste is dead, and barbarians—not from Barbary, but from Europe—have made the world a rubbish-heap of the vulgar, the gross, and the commonplace, if your disembodied spirits ever visit your lost kingdom in the pale glimpses of the moon, what must you think of these billycocks and ulsters, and of the people who wear them, and loll in mustard-coloured tourists’ suits against your dainty walls, and are taken like that and duly exhibited to other billycocks and ulsters in a soot-begrimed hole called London, that I don’t suppose any Moor ever heard of, and pointed to with pride as ‘Me and Jack taken in the Alhambra—don’t you know!’

I saw everything in Granada as quickly as I could, for the town is cold and the people are uncouth, and have a habit of looking upon the foreigner as their legitimate prey. Extortion, robbery, cheating, and imposition are rampant. To get about at all one must strew the ground with pesetas. Difficulties are made specially by the guides, in order that the silver key may be produced as often as possible. Being in a hurry to get away, I took a little man and bade him take me everywhere at once. But I told him if he took me to see a Murillo I would put my navaja into him. (I have seen 7,482 Murillos, all genuine, in Spain, and I am getting a little tired of them.) My little man took me everywhere; but every five minutes he turned round and exclaimed, ‘Aqui es costumbre dar una propina,’ which meant, ‘Here it is customary to give a tip.’ That wretched little man made me give pesetas to gardeners, servants, coachmen, doorkeepers, officials, watchmen, porters, and every person, male and female, who happened to be in the places or grounds I visited. And I know as well as possible that he afterwards returned and went ‘whacks’ with the lot. I protested once or twice, and tried to make him ashamed of himself, but he swore by all the saints that it was ‘costumbre.’ He admitted that it was an imposition, but he insisted that the people were paid no wages, and so had to live on what visitors gave them. When I had finished with him, however, I read him a long moral lecture, and gave him to understand that he must not take all the people who were not born in Granada for idiots. I’m afraid my protests were in vain. The motto of Granada will still remain, ‘Aqui es costumbre to fleece the foreigner.’

That which filled me with the greatest astonishment in Granada, after the Alhambra, was the way in which all the dogs of the town attended mass in the cathedral. Quite half the ladies who came in and knelt down brought dogs with them. The dogs didn’t sit still, but went on excursions into the different chapels, and visited the altars, and certainly, when there, their actions could not be interpreted as showing reverence or respect. I stood petrified to the spot when I saw a big retriever who came in with an old lady deliberately ascend the steps of the high altar, and sniff at the calves of the officiating priests. Nobody took any notice, except a little acolyte, who pulled the dog’s tail and then patted his head. Several cats being also in the sacred edifice, there were times when some of the dogs left off sniffing around and joined in a merry scamper after a startled tom, who fled and leapt for refuge on to some upper portion of an altar, and looked down and spat at his enemies. I have been in a good many cathedrals, but I never saw dogs enjoy so much liberty in one before. The people of Granada are exceptionally devout, which made me wonder all the more at the custom. But to admit dogs is the custom, and, being the custom, I suppose nobody thinks anything of it.

After the Alhambra, the great Mosque of Cordova is the most beautiful thing in Spain. Built by the Moors in 796, it still stands a monument of their glorious architecture. Charles V., in 1526, allowed a portion of it to be destroyed to make room for an ugly cathedral in the centre of it. When he saw the act of vandalism that the priests had persuaded him to permit he was deeply grieved, and exclaimed, ‘You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world!’ You can imagine how beautiful it must be for the man who knocked down half the Alhambra to build himself a hideously ugly drab-stone palace to be grieved at its partial destruction. This mosque is the finest type in Europe of a temple of Islam. It is a forest of beautiful marble pillars, supporting the most exquisite Moorish arches. I spent a whole day in the mosque with an intelligent little Italian, who knew every nook and corner of it.

When you get to Cordova you are never sure that you will see the mosque. You may not find it. Cordova is built on the principle of the maze at Hampton Court, but there is no nice kind gentleman on a raised platform to extricate you from the labyrinth of lanes. Even the inhabitants occasionally get lost, and wander up this street and down that for hours until they accidentally get to their homes again. Many of the dogs in Cordova have their owners’ names and addresses on their collars. This is a great help to the inhabitants. When a Cordovan gets lost he waits about and looks on all the dogs’ collars who run past him. When he sees a dog who has his (the lost inhabitant’s) street on its collar, he follows him, and is so guided home.

These things are not romances, but facts. Every street is exactly alike, and every street is crossed and recrossed by dozens of other streets, and they all wind in and out, and they are all about three feet wide—some of them are not two feet wide. Woe betide the stranger who ventures out alone, and does not know enough Spanish to ask to be guided home again! He may spend a week easily in trying to find his way back to the hotel.

The hotel in Cordova is one of the best in Spain, and is always crammed with foreigners. The best time to study the guests is at table d’hôte. I have always my ears and eyes open then. I am much amused by a young Frenchman who has been to London, and is entertaining the other French guests with an account of the marvels he has seen there. The English live entirely on mutton-chops and beefsteaks, and always have sauce out of bottles. They even put this sauce, which is black, over their pudding and into their tea. On Sundays the English have no dinner. They only have tea and cold meat. The French ladies hold up their hands and cry out that never will they venture into such a horrible country. The Frenchman then sends them into fits by describing the feet and boots of English young ladies. Their feet are enormous, and they wear big cloth boots with no heels to them. Many girls of only sixteen already have the gout. Englishmen drink beer out of pewter pots in the highest society. The Prince of Wales, even at his grand dinners at Marlborough House, always has beer in a pewter pot by his side.

Near the Frenchman who has been to London and gathered so much information sit an extraordinary family, who are the wonder of the hotel. There is an old gentleman who speaks nothing but English, and is married to a widow who speaks nothing but French, with two daughters by a former husband who speak nothing but German. It is the oddest family arrangement that I ever came across in my life.

Then there is a Russian gentleman who is three feet high and four feet across. His head is a big dumpling with two eyes and something that with the aid of a powerful magnifying glass you make out to be a nose. By way of compensation he has a mouth that goes right across his face and turns round each corner. His body is a larger dumpling, and for legs he has two boiled jam rolls.

We sit down 150 at table d’hôte, and 149 people leave off eating and sit in blank amazement when this little Russian commences operations upon an orange. With a series of snorts and a couple of wriggles he gets the peel off. He then puts the orange between his teeth and forces it into his mouth by hitting it hard with both his fists. During this operation the people opposite and on either side are continually ducking their heads to avoid squirts of orange-juice in the eye.

As soon as the little Russian succeeds in closing his mouth he goes black in the face, and remains so for about two minutes. At the end of this time there is a loud gurgle; then the great mouth slowly opens, and calmly and passively the owner allows the pulp from which the juice has been extracted to fall upon his plate in portions. Horrible as this description may sound, it falls far short of the actual truth.

The commencement of the last act of the Russian gentleman’s orange tragedy is the signal for everybody to jump up from the table and rush from the room.

There is another gentleman at table d’hôte—a Spaniard—who wouldn’t be a bad fellow if, after he had eaten a couple of olives between each course, he would put the stones anywhere except on the tablecloth. This gentleman is short-sighted, and has a pair of eye-glasses two sizes too large for the bridge of his nose. They drop into his soup, they come off into his wine, and they sometimes fall into the gravy of the dish the waiter is handing round. While the gentleman is fishing out his eye-glasses he drops his napkin. When the waiter picks up the napkin and presents it to him he drops his fork. By the time his fork has been restored to him his eye-glasses are in the dish again.

As the process is repeated with every course that comes to him, the gentlemen and ladies below him have several long waits during table d’hôte.

Many people will remember the case of the English doctor who shot a gipsy at Cordova. The gipsy was a well-known guide, who used to take foreigners to see the great mosque, from the tower of which an excellent view of Cordova can be obtained. Several tourists who had ascended the tower with him on previous occasions had either been seized with giddiness and fallen off, or committed suicide by throwing themselves over the parapet. The suicide theory was the one most generally adopted in the case of Englishmen, because the Spaniards still believe that all Englishmen suffer from a malady called El Spleen, and that El Spleen compels the sufferer to end his days and his sufferings in a violent manner. There are no coroners’ inquests in Spain, and so no one ever troubled much to inquire into the deaths, which, as far as public opinion was concerned, were easily accounted for by El Spleen.

It was while turning to descend from the tower that Dr. Middleton found himself suddenly grasped round the throat by the gipsy guide, Heredia, and in such a manner that nothing but a shot from a pistol, which luckily enough he carried in a back pocket, could free him from his assailant. The doctor was acquitted, and the verdict was received with applause by a crowded court. There can be no doubt of the impartiality of Spanish judges, and of the friendly feeling which exists among Spaniards for Englishmen. That this feeling should have been expressed in loud applause in an open court in Cordova is all the more remarkable when we bear in mind that the gipsies who swarm in the city were actually thirsting for the blood of the Englishman who had taken the life of one of their race, and were threatening revenge on all those who ventured to express sympathy for Dr. Middleton. The gipsies of the south of Spain have always been a power in the country, and there are instances on record which prove that the Government has on more than one occasion been compelled to conciliate them by granting them small privileges. In the days following the revolution which led to the flight of Queen Isabella the gipsies became for a time a terror to all law-abiding and inoffensive citizens, and it was only by executing summary justice upon gipsy culprits that their power was broken.

The gipsies both of Cordova and Granada still, however, maintain the privilege of acting as guides to those who are foolish enough to take them. Outside the Hotel Suizo in Cordova there are always dozens of them hanging about. The reason of this is that it is utterly impossible for a stranger to find his way about Cordova alone. The narrow streets cross and recross each other in a perfect maze, and they are all exactly alike, so that there is no landmark for the pedestrian to steer by, and, as the streets are too narrow to admit carriages, a guide is a sheer necessity.

CHAPTER VII.
COSAS DE ESPAÑA.

From Cordova I came on to San Sebastian, the Brighton of Spain. How people can go to Biarritz while there is a San Sebastian, I cannot imagine. I have never seen such a beautiful watering-place, or one surrounded by such magnificent scenery. And all around is hallowed English ground, for here and at Pasajes are hundreds of graves of English officers and soldiers who fell in the siege. The graves on the hill at San Sebastian are terribly neglected. Many of the stones are overgrown with weeds, and the inscriptions are effaced. A few pounds judiciously spent would put them in order again. Wild and picturesque is the rough mountain cemetery of British heroes who fell in a far-off land; but, unless something is done, a few more years will see many of the headstones down, and the graves overgrown with weed and briar, and then no man will know where our dead braves lie.

Pasajes, the quaintest place in the world, is within easy reach of San Sebastian. It is a land-locked harbour, and looks for all the world like a lake surrounded on all sides by hills, until you come upon a gully between high, overhanging cliffs, when, after a few minutes’ sail, you catch a glimpse of the open sea. One of the rocks is surmounted by a castle tower, and is called Castillo de Santa Isabel. Pasajes is a thriving town, and it is from this port that the Basques and Spanish emigrants sail for South America; but it is doubtful whether it has not missed its vocation. With a harbour the existence of which cannot be guessed from the sea, it is an ideal pirate’s nest.

After a Spanish tour is over, the traveller divides Spain into two portions—the portion that was conquered by the Moor, and the portion that was not. Of the first portion he brings away a wondrous remembrance of glorious architecture and graceful decoration; of the second portion, the things which linger longest in his memory are the dances and the bull-fights.

To me the worst part of a bull-fight was the barbarous cruelty to the horses. They had no chance. They were simply brought into the arena to be gored, and, when they fell, they were beaten most brutally with sticks to get them to rise again. When they staggered to their feet, and tottered in the death agony, the Spaniards shouted with laughter. Even when the poor beasts lay in the last quiver of death, they were barbarously ill-used by the assistants, who tore the harness from them to put it on other victims. A more dastardly exhibition of brutality I never witnessed in my life. One feels sorry for the bull; but at least he has some sport. His treatment is cruel enough in all conscience; but he has four or five years of luxurious living in order to prepare him for his death. The poor horses only come to the arena to be tortured after wearing out their lives in the service of their master. Many of them are poor half-starved cab horses, and can hardly totter when they are spurred and beaten into the ring. If you say to a Spaniard that it is cruel to beat a horse like this, he stares at you and says, ‘Ah, but he is not a good horse, no vale na; he is worth nothing.’ There are some points in a bull-fight which command admiration for skill and dexterity. The espadas (the real heroes of the proceedings, the leading actors and stars) perform brilliant feats alone with the bull, and often incur great risks. But these would be far more worthy of admiration if they were performed before the bull had been tired out by baiting and weakened by loss of blood, instead of after. But it is useless protesting to a Spaniard. Bull-fights are their national pastime—the love of them is born with them, and you might as well try to mop up the sea as to put them down or abate their cruelty.

The horses and the horsemanship in Madrid are unequalled in any other town of Europe. The men ride as if they were born in the saddle. They ride horses that would cause every head to turn in Rotten Row over the stone-paved streets and in and out of the heaviest traffic. The Andalusian horse is a beautiful creature, and here is groomed to perfection. Everybody in Madrid keeps a horse and a carriage. Everything is sacrificed for show and outward appearance. There are families who go without meat for dinner that they may turn out in the drive in good style.

In Madrid I learnt the national cure for a cold on the chest. You squeeze the juice of an orange into a cup; you put in a heap of sugar, and you fill up with a hot decoction of marshmallow, which they call Flor de Malva. Then you go to bed and perspire. The next morning your chest is easy. I tried the remedy and found it efficacious. The drink is soothing and comforting. Try it. You need not wait till you have a cold.

Bad money is very common in all parts of Spain. Sometimes the coins have merely undergone the process of ‘sweating,’ more often than not they are altogether spurious.

Some years ago the newspapers announced that, on a certain day, new five-peseta pieces, bearing as impress the head of the little King, would be issued. No one had yet seen a coin with the effigy of the Rey chico, and so the issue of the new coins was awaited with eagerness. A gang of coiners immediately set to work, and early on the morning of the day announced they set forth to circulate them. One of them would enter a tramcar or omnibus and offer the conductor, when the latter came for his fare, one of the ‘new coins.’ The conductor naturally remarked upon it as the first he had seen, and examined it with interest. The curiosity of the passengers was roused; everybody was eager to see the new coins and the first portrait of the little King; and so when the owner of it explained that he had just come from the Bank, where he had received a number of them, and said that he was willing to exchange a few of the new pieces for old ones, his offer was gratefully accepted. Thus it happened that before a single genuine coin had left the Mint, Madrid was in possession of an immense number of false ones.

In a previous chapter I referred to the Spanish theatre, and I mentioned the peculiarities of the modern drama as it is understood in Spain. The favourite dramatist of the day, the Most Excellent Señor Don José Echegaray, had just produced a new drama at the Teatro Español, in Madrid, which only took him thirty days to write, according to rumour. The title of the drama is ‘La Realidad y el Delirio’ (Reality and Delirium), and there is a good deal of both in the production. The plot is a fair specimen of Echegaray’s method and the kind of drama which the Spaniards accept as an evening’s entertainment, and so it may interest the reader to hear all about it, more especially as since the Ibsen boom set in our English critics have taken Echegaray under their wing.

Gonzalo and Angela are newly married, and, like most newly-married folks, they love each other. Enrico is Gonzalo’s friend; he is also a bad young man who has conceived an unholy passion for his friend’s wife. One day he tells Angela that Gonzalo, who has just left home, pretending that he was to make a long journey on business, is really about to pay a visit to a young lady who lives in a certain house in a street close by. Angela is much upset by the communication, and becomes a prey to various conflicting emotions. Enrico, at last, while she is in a state of great excitement, induces her to accompany him to a lonely house, from the windows of which she sees Gonzalo entering the house of Julia, the young lady previously referred to. Angela faints and falls into Enrico’s arms.

When she recovers from her swoon she despises herself in strong language and goes home. Gonzalo returns. He tells his wife all she knows already, but explains that he went to see Miss Julia in order to break off all relations with her. This noble confession fills Angela with remorse, and she bitterly repents her jealousy and wickedness. She spreads herself out in forcible and poetic language, and at considerable length, over the height of her husband’s love and the depth of her own impropriety.

Enrico has promised Angela never to see her again, and, desiring to keep his word, he calls upon Gonzalo to bid him good-bye, previous to setting out on a long sea voyage. Gonzalo, who loves his friend, refuses to hear of such a scheme, and proposes instead that they should all go to Paris together. Enrico hesitates and is lost. He consents to go to Paris.

On the way to ‘la Ville Lumière’ an accident on the line causes Gonzalo to alight from the reserved compartment in which they are all travelling together. Gonzalo smokes a cigarette and strolls on the line and inspects the country; but he goes a little too far, and sees the train starting on its journey again without him. He runs after and catches it up (an easy matter in Spain, where five miles an hour is the express speed), but in the hurry he jumps into the wrong compartment, which is not the ‘reservado,’ but the one next to it. The night is dark, and the light from the illuminated ‘reservado’ throws a shadowy picture on the walls of a black cutting through which the train is speeding. Gonzalo, looking out of the window, sees the ‘shadow on the wall.’ He recognises the silhouettes of his wife and his friend. Suddenly he sees the shadows approach each other. One shadow puts its arm round the other shadow’s neck and kisses it. Presently both shadows’ arms are flung around both shadows’ necks. Gonzalo waits to see no more. Hideous thoughts flash across his frenzied brain. He opens the door of the compartment, gets out upon the footboard, and is making his way along it to the ‘reservado’ to demand an explanation of the occupants, when his foot slips and he falls heavily upon the line.

Gonzalo escapes death, but he loses his reason. He is picked up and attended to, and in time he recovers from his wounds, only to be haunted by the memory of what he saw that fatal night. He raves wildly, madly. He does not know whether what he saw was real or a hideous nightmare: whether it was reality or delirium. In this scene the actor takes the middle of the stage and gives off some of the finest dramatic soliloquies that Señor Echegaray has ever written.

There is one person beside the guilty parties who knows the truth. This is the father of Gonzalo. He puts matters to rights by having a duel with Enrico and killing him. Enrico, repenting his villainy, makes but a poor defence of his life. The father of Gonzalo then forgives Angela, and Gonzalo recovers his senses and embraces his wife, and the curtain falls with Angela standing between father and son and representing, according to the author, ‘the innocent victim of a villain’s lawless love, purified by the suffering she has endured and the sorrow she has known.’

CHAPTER VIII.
OFF TO AFRICA.

‘Africa’ has not a very taking sound about it. When I told my friends and acquaintances that I was going to Africa, they had visions of lions and snakes, and jungles and swamps, and they insisted on my taking with me an armoury of guns and rifles, and a pharmacy of drugs and antidotes. I am going, however, to keep as much out of the track of the lions as possible; at least, I shall avoid the lions that have to be attacked with firearms, but the lions that you attack with a visiting-card I certainly hope I shall encounter. I have a beautiful letter of introduction to the reigning sovereign of Morocco, which I hope to present to him in his imperial palace (Dar Dabiba) when I go to Fez-al-jadeed and Fez-al-baleed, and I am assured that he will give me a royal reception, and trot out his dancing dervishes and his snake charmers for my edification. I have also a letter of introduction to a great Moorish General, a direct descendant of Othello, who will provide me with an escort of soldiers when I go to Wazan, which is a long way up country, and where I am bound to go, as I have a little business with the Grand Shereef, who resides there. I shall be obliged to have an escort, because the people of that district are so fanatical that there is no knowing what they might do to me. Mogador, Tetuan, and Tangiers are also on my visiting list, so that you may expect a great deal of Oriental imagery and barbaric splendour in these pages. In Algeria I shall sojourn awhile also, and I may pay a flying visit to Carthage, where I am desirous of making a few inquiries with regard to the career of a young lady named Salammbo. This is my programme as it is at present shaped in my mind’s eye, Horatio. Whether I shall be enabled to carry it out, of course, depends on circumstances; but I shall get over a good deal of the ground mentioned, and I have no doubt I shall see some very wonderful things, and meet with many exciting adventures.

At present the Fates have brought me no further than Marseilles; but even the short distance from the capital of France to the Mediterranean seaport was not accomplished without a struggle. We were unable in Paris to secure seats in the ‘train of luxury’ one January night, but I was told there was another train at 7.15 which would do the journey to Marseilles in fifteen hours twenty-seven minutes by the time-table. The platform was crowded with dukes and duchesses with their footmen, and ladies’ maids and lap-dogs, who, like myself, had not been able to get seats in the ‘train de luxe,’ and who were going by the 7.15, which was a first-class express with sleeping-cars, and all that we should miss would be the restaurant and the smoking-saloon. I brightened up at this information, and we called several porters to take our luggage and secure us a berth in the sleeping-car. The porters looked at us as though we had asked for a bit of the sun to put in our pockets to keep our hands warm. ‘A berth in the sleeping-car, monsieur!’ exclaimed the first porter who recovered his breath. ‘Ha, ha! monsieur is joking; why, they are all booked a week in advance to Marseilles at this season of the year.’ ‘Well, then,’ I said savagely, ‘at least find us two corner seats in a smoking-carriage.’ ‘I will try, monsieur,’ replied the porter, and away he sped. In a few minutes he returned, shrugged his shoulders apologetically, and delivered himself of the following elegant sentence: ‘It touches me to the heart, and causes me profound sorrow, to have to inform monsieur that every corner seat is taken.’

It was true. I had heard a good deal about the fight for seats in the Marseilles express, but I realized it for the first time then. We were dragged up the train and down the train; we got on this step and on that, and peered into compartment after compartment. It was the same tale everywhere. Every coach was jammed as full as a cattle truck. At last there was a crowd of about fifty passengers for Marseilles all clamouring for seats, and there was not a single vacant place. Then the Chef de Gare most condescendingly informed me that he would put on another carriage. We felt deeply grateful. Having paid £4 4s. for a seat, we felt that the company was placing us under a life-long obligation by giving us one for our money. So we bowed to the ground to the station-master, and begged him to accept the assurance of our most distinguished consideration. He accepted it. Then we offered handfuls of francs to the railway porters, and these were also accepted. In return for our largesse, we told them we required them, when the extra carriage was joined on, to hold the crowd back until we had jumped in and secured the corners. When that extra carriage came, it was Waterloo all over again. But the arms of England (mine and Albert Edward’s) were finally victorious, and we beat back four Frenchmen, a Russian, a German, two Poles, a couple of Arabs, and a Greek, and captured two corners. Directly we were seated the crowd poured in upon us, and at 7.15 we steamed out of the station—eight in the compartment, and about fourteen portmanteaux, nine hat-boxes, eight bundles of rugs, and ten parcels piled up to the ceiling on the top of us. It was an hour before we had sorted ourselves, and got the hand luggage packed away in the nets above and under the seats. By this time we were stifling. Both the windows were shut, the foot-warmers were burning hot, and the place was the Black Hole of Calcutta multiplied by eight. Albert Edward requested the permission of our fellow travellers to have the window a little way down, as we were nearly asphyxiated. Albert Edward asked the French passengers in French, the Germans in German, the Arabs in Arabic, and the Russians in Russian; and they all admired his linguistic attainments, but absolutely declined to allow the windows to be opened one inch, or for one second. They inquired in their various languages if he desired their immediate death. He replied that he did not; but that was the catastrophe he wished to avoid for me. I joined in gently but firmly, and brilliantly distinguished myself in all the languages except the Russian. But the enemy remained immovable.

Suddenly Albert Edward had an idea. His German-Arab features relaxed into an expression of sardonic glee. When everybody was dropping off to sleep he put it into execution. He struck a whole box of Vesuvians, one after the other. There was a simultaneous sneeze, six sleepers leapt to their feet coughing and gesticulating and swearing, and in an instant both windows were pulled down with a bang, and the fresh, pure air of heaven rushed into the black hole.

Over the agonies of that long night of intermittent suffocation I draw a partial veil. Now and again by some violent expedient, such as fancying we heard an accident, or pretending that we had run over a man, or that Mount Vesuvius in a state of eruption was distinctly visible on our left, we succeeded in getting a window down for a minute or two; but from 7.15 p.m. until 10.42 a.m. we were mercilessly smashed and stifled in a compartment which was not a first-class carriage, but a tin of compressed humanity.

At a little after eight o’clock in the morning we reached Avignon, and here we had five minutes for refreshment. I should like to have been an artist, to have made a sketch of the station as it appeared when the passengers alighted and dashed wildly at a little table set out with basins of hot coffee and rolls of bread a yard long. The ladies looked lovely, as they always do, but the circumstances were trying. Complexions are not at their best, nor is the coiffure at its apogee of excellence, when you have been sitting all night long in your clothes in a hermetically sealed railway-carriage. And the dirt and grime of travel will stain the most delicate cheek, and the flying grit of the engine will lodge occasionally on the most aristocratic nose, and get into the most lustrous and beautiful eyes. I say it without disrespect, but we were a seedy, pallid, untidy and unkempt lot that turned out on the platform of Avignon in the morning sunlight, and scalded our throats with coffee out of pudding-basins, and fought our way through the crowd at the buffet with the three feet rolls that were at once weapons of attack and defence. I was much interested in the duchesses en deshabille, also in the footmen in chimney-pot hats, and in the ladies’ maids with smashed bonnets, who flew up and down the platform, vainly trying to arrange their mistresses’ hair, and put them a little to rights, with a bowl of hot coffee in one hand, and a roll in the other. One clever maid put her coffee on the platform, and held her roll between her teeth, while with her two hands she dexterously arranged her lady’s back hair in an ornamental and chaste design, and stabbed it with hairpins at the rate of ten a second.

But the most charming feature of that five minutes’ wait was to me the way in which the dukes and earls and millionaires from the coupés and the sleeping-cars were deprived of their coffee and roll by their obedience to the will of their wives. A duchess said to her husband: ‘John, I think Fido wants a walk.’ And with her own fair hands she dragged a big black poodle from under the seat, and gave him to the duke. The duke accepted Fido without a murmur, and led him up and down the platform by his chain for the whole five minutes. Another lady handed her husband a little black-and-tan terrier to be exercised in a similar manner. Before the bell rang I counted seven husbands all walking their wives’ pet dogs up and down the platform, and some even went outside the station with the dogs in order that the little dears might not fancy themselves debarred by surrounding circumstances from any of the privileges of the usual morning run at home.

All things come to an end in this world, and so did our journey to Marseilles, which I have related to show that the troubles of African explorers often begin much nearer home; but it is a wonder we didn’t come to an end first. When, however, at noon I lounged on the harbour quays, amid such a wild, dark, picturesque crowd as few other European towns could produce, I was amply compensated for all my trials on the road. I never saw such a collection of flashing eyes and coal-black hair and sunburnt faces in my life. There were Italians and Spaniards and Greeks, and all the fierce and dusky sons of the Levant; there were Turks and Arabs and Egyptians and Syrians and African blacks, and the natives added to the picturesqueness of the crowd with their swarthy faces, fierce eyes, and splendid hair; and I stood with the motley crowd and lolled with my back against the wall, sunning myself as they did, and feeling beautifully Bohemian and lamentably lazy. It was such a treat, after the harsh travelling of the North, to find one’s self wooed by the warm breeze and kissed by the burning sun, that I couldn’t have taken my hands out of my pockets and left off lolling against that south wall if the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any other of my most intimate friends, had come by. For a whole two hours did I and Albert Edward loll about and frizzle and shut one eye, like dogs going to sleep, but I kept my other eye open wide enough to take a few observations, and make a note of them.

The Eastern custom of standing in a circle largely prevailed with the crowd of idlers. Here was a group of Greeks in full costume in a circle; there a group of Italians in a circle. The Marseilles sailors and labourers, and the Marseilles old ladies and the Marseilles young ladies, ‘circled’ also; they all stood and screamed at each other, and shouted at the top of their voices (this is conversation in Marseilles), but no one ever broke the circle.

The groups and the crowds of swarthy sons and daughters of the South were not exactly the sort of groups and crowds one would like to be alone in, with the Bank of England in one’s pockets. I should say one might have manned a dozen pirate ships at any one quay in five minutes. Knives were worn handy, and there was a flash of steel more than once when argument became high. But for all that the men and women themselves wore a good deal of common jewellery; watch-chains by the score I counted across the woollen waistcoats of the sailors, and most of the men had heavy earrings in their ears. The scarlet sashes worn round the waists, the blue and green plush trousers, and the bright orange and red handkerchiefs twisted over the heads of some of the women, turban fashion, imparted to portions of the crowd an operatic look, and I expected every minute to hear them commence a chorus.

I had my boots blacked on the Quay du Port, and a marvellous boy in rags performed the office. Murillo might have been tempted to come out of his grave to paint him. When everything else fails, and I am quite tired of respectable life, I shall come to Marseilles, and spend the rest of my days in lolling on the quay and basking in the sun.

Yet perhaps I had better wait before I finally make up my mind on the subject of Marseilles, for down the harbour on my right there lies at anchor the ship which is to carry me across the blue Mediterranean to the African shore. And who knows?—I might like Algiers better.

CHAPTER IX.
ALGIERS.

‘High Street, Africa,’ is a very nice address to give to your creditors or to people who worry you with letters about nothing at all, and require an immediate and categorical answer; but it is not an address which facilitates the reception of the latest news from England. I have been able to leave nothing more definite at home for the guidance of the officials of the International Postal Service. For this reason I am in a state of the most blissful ignorance as to what is happening at home. I am sitting in the sun, I pluck oranges, gather bananas and prickly pears, and go into the garden after breakfast and pick green peas and dig up new potatoes. When you are where you can do this in the first week of January, it would be the concentrated essence of idiotism to bother yourself as to who is the responsible person for clearing away the snow and the slush that have stopped the traffic of Downing Street, and converted legislative pedestrianism into a process of slipping and sliding, and coming down bang on your back.

I like High Street, Africa, very much indeed. I have got so far along it as the Djur-Djura Hills, among the Atlas Mountains. I am on friendly terms with the great mountain tribes of Kabylia, and the lion and the panther are my next-door neighbours. But I did not get so far all at once, and as the process of getting there has been to me both novel and instructive, I fancy it may be the same to some of my readers—say eighteen out of the twenty millions. The other two millions can skip this chapter if they don’t care about it, and read the advertisements at the end of this volume.

We left Marseilles, not by the Messageries, but by a much more ‘up to date’ line—the Compagnie Transatlantique. A more magnificent vessel than the Ville de Tunis it would be hard to find in the Mediterranean service, and she rushes through the water at the rate of nineteen-and-a-half knots an hour. But oh, that ‘awful night at sea!’ Tell me no more of your blue Mediterranean. I had it black—black and furious. It blew a gale nearly the whole voyage, and the ship rolled to such an extent that it was impossible to lie in one’s berth. All night long it was a hideous crash of crockery and furniture, piteous groans of men, and the terrified cries of women, and the day brought no relief. For twenty-eight long hours did we roll from side to side in the trough of a raging sea, expecting every moment that the ship would roll an inch too far and go right over. If you don’t know what it is to feel for a night and day that you are going to be drowned in a minute, you won’t appreciate the feelings of the poor bruised and battered and bilious and broken-hearted passengers who sailed with me over that five hundred miles of misery that separates France from Africa, Marseilles from Algiers.

We made Algiers shortly before midnight on Sunday. But our troubles were not over. Beautiful in the moonlight lay Algiers, the houses and mosques of the Arabs glistening in pearly whiteness above the long line of lights of the European quarter, and the whole shut in by a background of far-off hills of snow. But we had to get there, and the ships don’t go up to the quays. To the terror of the timorous it was explained that as soon as the ship’s doctor had gone ashore, and certified that we had no cholera or infectious disease on board, we should be fetched off in small boats by Arab boatmen. And so we were.