We would go
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then, when
the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.
This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of
piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we
prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday
afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on
Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing
concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising
that I could hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could
not possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the
arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down together
in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one another.
We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see
a bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come away
before we had time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go at
Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath.
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