Such homely natures
console the traveler for the thousand inhospitalities of travel, and
bind races and religions together in spite of patriotism and piety.
We were going first to the Cartuja, and in the city, which we found
curiously much more modern, after the Latin notion, than Seville, with
freshly built apartment-houses and business blocks, we took a cab, not
so modern as to be a taxicab, and drove through the quarter said to have
been assigned to the Moors after the fall of Granada. The dust lay thick
in the roadway where filthy children played, but in the sunny doorways
good mothers of families crouched taking away the popular reproach of
vermin by searching one another's heads. Men bestriding their donkeys
rode fearlessly through the dust, and one cleanly-looking old peasant
woman, who sat hers plumply cushioned and framed in with a chair-back
and arms, showed a patience with the young trees planted for future
shade along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated.
When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long since
suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of beggarmen waited
for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the
church door, where she shared in our impartial alms.
Pages:
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389