His invention had probably never been put to such stress
before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments, which we
subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our
search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where we could have
the range of a flat roof outside if we wanted; but as the private family
living next door kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we
were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we
then thought it, though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was
not uncommon on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling
how we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked our
roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however, we
thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the
manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience,
and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.
Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic
chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was
so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock
in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already.
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