I am
glad now to think that many of them could not see with their poor blind
eyes the face which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to the
music of our horses' bells.
The bells pretty well covered our horses from their necks to their
haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the
driver whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy
whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers who
know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we met, and
he had a joking compliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of
him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver
as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the
feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave
the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal
acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes have
been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which I
fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint recurrent odor, as if
in testimony of the driver's derivation from those old rancid
Christians, as the Spaniards used to call them, whose lineage had never
been crossed with Moorish blood.
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