At Cordova we learned
that it was the closed season for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of
usefulness to the Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the
very metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up from
their native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and the
_aficionados,_ who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole rest of
Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no more
bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bullfights,
till April, and now we were only in October. We said, Never mind; we
would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at Granada the season was even
more hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, as Seville
is the home of the bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty
arena; and at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision.
By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there had
been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the
last _espada_ dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last bull
transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other _toreros,_ the
_banderilleros_ with their darts and the picadors with their
disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena.
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