On our way home we had occasion to practise a
like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting
through the casement of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the
sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open _patios._ Many people
besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark
figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the
invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some
period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a
more inoffensive way of doing it.
By the sort of echo notable in life's experience we had a reverberation
of the orange-flower perfume of that night in the orange-flower honey at
breakfast next morning. We lived to learn that our own bees gather the
same honey from the orange flowers of Florida; but at the time we
believed that only the bees of Seville did it, and I still doubt whether
anywhere in America the morning wakes to anything like the long, rich,
sad calls of the Sevillian street hucksters. It is true that you do not
get this plaintive music without the accompanying note of the hucksters'
donkeys, which, if they were better advised, would not close with the
sort of inefficient sifflication which they now use in spoiling an
otherwise most noble, most leonine roar.
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