These emperors (I will not be stopped by any
guide-book from saying) were Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius; and Triana
is named for the first of them. Fortunately, we turned to the right
after crossing the bridge and so escaped the gipsy quarter, but we
paused through a long street so swarming with children that we wondered
to hear whole schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their lessons
as we made our way among the tenants. Fortunately, they played mostly in
the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their years and
riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which childhood
bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To say that those Spanish
children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish babies as English
children is to say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a babe as
only a mother can in an office which the pictures and images of the Most
Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle
is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms
and crooned whatever was the Spanish of--
Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b'ar;
Rack back, baby, see it hangin' thar.
For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our
backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and
hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic
joltings.
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