There was especially
a hoy who, after being compassionated in money for his misfortune,
continued to fling his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our window
by some masterly gymnastics; and there was another boy who kept
lamenting that he had no mother, till, having duly feed and fed him, I
suggested, "But you have a father?" Then, as if he had never seen the
case in that light before, he was silent, and presently went away
without further insistence on his bereavement.
The laconic fidelity of my note-book enables me to recall here that the
last we saw of Seville was the Cathedral and the Giralda, which the
guide-books had promised us we should see first; that we passed some
fields of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from Africa and the
Spanish have carried to America; that in places men were plowing and
that the plowed land was red; that the towns on the uplands in the
distance were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in Castile; that
the morning sky was blue, with thin, pale clouds; that the first station
out was charmingly called Two Brothers, and that the loungers about it
were plain, but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some actually
clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her hair; that Two
Brothers is a suburb of Seville, frequented in the winter, and has
orange orchards about it; that farther on at one place the green of the
fields spread up to the walls of a white farm with a fine sense of
color; that there were hawks sailing in the blue air; that there were
grotesque hedges of cactus and piles of crooked cactus logs; that there
were many eucalyptus trees; that there were plantations of young olives,
as if never to let that all-pervading industry perish; that there were
irregular mountain ranges on the right, but never the same kind of
scenery on both sides of the track; that there was once a white cottage
on a yellow hill and a pink villa with two towers; that there was a
solitary fig tree near the road, and that there were vast lonely fields
when there were not olive orchards.
Pages:
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372