Of course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they were
wrong; but I think we were the only people in that neighborhood who got
any sleep that night or the next. We slept the sleep of exhaustion, but
I believe those Cordovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep
within. It was apparently their custom to walk and talk the night away
in the streets, not our street alone, but all the other streets of
Cordova; the laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular
despair of getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening
from rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained
measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an
exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there
remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited which has
ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every comfort and advantage
lacking to our hotel. I suppose I am the stronger in this belief because
when we came to it we had been so disappointed with the others that we
had not the courage to go inside. Smell for smell, the interior of that
hotel may have harbored a worse one than the odor of henhouse which
pervaded ours, I hope from the materials for calcimining the rooms on
the _patio.
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