Possibly they exist, but they do not exist openly, any more
than the descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their Moslem
rites. As for the beggars, to whom I return as they constantly returned
to us, it did not avail to do them charity; that by no means dispersed
them; the thronging misery and mutilation in the lame, the halt and the
blind, was as great at our coming back to our hotel as our going out of
it. They were of every age and sex; the very school-children left their
sports to chance our charity; and it is still with a pang that I
remember the little girl whom we denied a copper when she was really
asking for a _florecito_ out of the nosegay that one of us carried. But
how could we know that it was a little flower and not a "little dog" she
wanted?
There was something vividly spectacular in the square, by no means
large, which we came into on turning the corner from our hotel. It was a
sort of market-place as well as business place, and it looked as if it
might be the resort at certain hours of the polite as well as the
impolite leisure of a city of leisure not apparently overworked in any
of its classes. But at ten o'clock in the morning it was empty enough,
and after a small purchase at one of the shops we passed from it without
elbowing or being elbowed, and found ourselves at the portal of that
ancient _posada_ where Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least
long enough to write one of his _Exemplary Novels.
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