Spanish Highways and Byways

heart. Seville had ever been for me the symbol of light,

t clamber, slipping on wet stones, down a precipitous path to peer, from under dripping umbrellas, at what our guide declared was an old Roman bridge? "It doesn't look old and it doesn't look Roman," was the artist's dubious comment, but our highly recommended conductor, a Gib, as the English-Spanish natives of Gibraltar Rock are called, assured us that it was built in the days of Julius C?sar, but had been wonderfully well preserved. We eyed him thoughtfully, bearing in mind that he had already pointed out the statue of a long-dead poet as a living politician; but we meekly continued through the lashing rain to follow his long footsteps over the breakneck ways of that

to slip out unattended to the neighboring alameda, with its far-sweeping prospect of folded mountain ranges and its vertical view of gorge and rushing river, the children actually hounded us back to the hotel. Their leader was a scrofulous boy, with one cheek eaten away, who had b

. It was, forsooth, St. Joseph's Day, and every Don José, every Do?a Josefa, every little Pepe, every pretty Pepita, must be saluted by a serenade. All Andalusians are musical, taking much ple

he like. Our turn came first of all. "You are English?" "We speak English." "Ha!" He fell into our own vernacular. "Came about three thousand miles to Spain?" "Across the channel." He chuckled with prompt appreciation of the situation and mendaciously translated to the carriage at large, "The ladies are distinguished L

lls where the bitter olive is wont to pour its juice." Orange plantations and hedges of the bluish aloe, fig trees, palms, and all manner of strange, tropical flowers gladdened our approach to S

, scolded, expostulated, threatened, picked out his men, beat down their prices, called up a policeman t

tcheries from which we shall never more go free. It was all as Oriental as a dream. The Sultana of the South lifted her gleaming coronet of domes and pinnacles above such a kingdom of idle, delicious mirth as has pe

world, my

ither trut

hings tak

ass befor

eyes like beacons in the dark," her sighing serenaders, "lyrical mosquitoes," outside the grated window or beneath the balcony, her fragrances of rose and jessamine, her poetic sense of values. A homeless Andalusian, dinnerless and in rags, strums on his guitar, a necessity which he would not dream

missing,

sia's pur

e beauties a

he wits s

l is not charm. Grace, mirth, and music, on the one hand, are offset by ignorance, suffering, and vice on the other. Many evil things were told us, and s

cture-making summit of the Giralda, as he lingers through his blo

ack and stingin

e decent bod

ing the full length. Here ladies sit in pairs and groups, never singly, to cheapen fans and mantillas, while the smiling salesmen, cigarette in hand, shr

qualit

as God's

ud voice if they carry garters in their knives. The irascible dames do not stand upon fine points of rhetoric, however, and when the small boy has delivered his shot, he does well to take to his heels. We once saw one of these sturdy women, while a line of soldiers, bristling with ste

ll and dreary a little fellow that he hardly grasped the coppers when they were thrust into his weakly groping hands, and hardly stayed his monotonous formula of entreaty for his other monotonous formula of thanks. There was an idiot child in Seville-a mere lump of deformity-that would rush out upon the startled stranger with an inarticulate, fierce little yell, clutching at chari

e of our luncheon as well as my own. She was too young and too polite to reproach me, but too hungry to be comforted by the assurance that I reproached myself. Sometimes a foreign traveller, very sure of his Spanish, would attempt remonstrance with these small nuisances. I remember one kindly Teuton in particular. Commerce had clai

bra. Hall

abit of thine. I told

, s

ert begging at the windows, to my shame if not to thi

k, s

will. Learn to read and write. Wash thy face and change thy customs

and a half millions that make up the population of S

f his greatest compositions, to the Museo Provincial, where over a score of the Master's sacred works, lovely Virgins, longing saints, deep-eyed Christ-Childs, rain their sweet influence. And first, last, and always, there is the cathedral. We had been stunned at Burgos, blind to all save the Moorish features of Cordova, almost untouched by the cold splendors of Granada, but to Seville, as later to Toledo, we surrendered utterly. Beauty, mystery, sublimity-these are Seville cathedral. Five centuries have gone to the rearing and enriching of those solemn aisles and awful choir. The colossal structure, second in size only to St. Peter's, is a majesty before which Luther himself might well have trembled. Within a Spanish cathedral one begins to understand the mighty hold of Roman Catholicism on Spain. "I love," says Alarcón, whose jest and earnest are as closely twined as fibres of the same heart, "the clou

ls and with flowers in the hair. We rattle past the cathedral, over the bridge to Triana and out into the sweet-breathed country, passing many a picturesque group on the road,-these two peasants, for example, with their yellow-handled knives thrust into scarlet girdles, tossing dice under a fig tree. Our meditations among the crumbling blocks of that savage play-house would perhaps interest the reader less than our luncheon. Such