A gardener whom we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a
sort of vegetable calm, and not very different from theirs except that
they were not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in
his apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from the
ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as
if he could bear no more went away. In one wilding place which seemed
set apart for a nursery several men were idly working with many pauses,
but not so many as to make the spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned
and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace
which Peter the Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown
stucco ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic
frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and rank.
It was this savage prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft
Moorish taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature
loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certain other
Spanish kings of that period. This is the notion of my unadvertised
_Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ and perhaps we ought to think of him
leniently as Peter the Ferocious.
Pages:
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325