THE Guadalquiver was a swollen, tawny flood, whirling dead leaves and dry branches down to the sea.

“Look,” said Pemberton, “the river has piled enough firewood against the piers of Triana bridge to keep a thrifty family a month.” A small boat, sculled by an old fisherman with gold earrings and a blue jersey, crept slowly towards the largest pile of brushwood at the middle pier. “I’m glad Isidro comes in for that bit of luck; he is a good sort, brings us fish every fast day, and doesn’t know I have a bula de cruzada and may eat meat o’ Fridays. We shall see him at the house soon; when the river is at the flood we sometimes get shad,—an advantage of living in Seville.”

As he roped the driftwood to the stern, the old fellow sang in a high, quavering voice a popular copla:

Other women are praised as sweet, the Andaluz as salt! Andalusian salt is the supreme quality, wit, sparkle, humor, grace combined.

A white yacht, a fine lady of the sea, lay alongside the river bank near the Paseo de las Delicias. Sailors were busy polishing brass that shone before, scrubbing decks already clean as starched damask. A blond viking sitting aft, mending a sail, sang a stave that told where he and the yacht Peerless hailed from.

By the Torre del Oro, the Buenaventura, from Malaga, a rusty freight steamer, was taking on cargo. The stevedores, like busy brown ants, trotted to and fro, stooping under bales of cotton from the Isla Mayor in the delta. The mole smelt tarry and sea-faring; looked prosperous, bustling, alive. Watching sailors, stevedores, longshoremen, we tried to visualize our emotions, but alas, the set pieces of sentimental fireworks, prepared beforehand, wouldn’t go off! We reminded ourselves that here, in this port of Seville, the Tribunal of the Indies, the whole trade of the Americas once centred. From the shadow of that old Moorish tower of gold, the Spanish galleons sailed for the new world, carrying the yeast and ferment of young adventurous blood, bringing back—a poor exchange—the ingots of the Incas. Alas! No ghost, not even of Columbus sailing up the Guadalquiver that Palm Sunday of his triumph, could materialize in that vital atmosphere of oozing kegs, fish-nets, and oakum. A swart gypsy dropped a line into the river, a crane flapped across the sky, a fish leaped, flashing silver in the sun; the wonderbook of life was still to read; history and its ghosts must wait for old age and winter fireside.

It had rained for three days and nights, to the discomfort of flocks, herds, dealers, breeders, gypsies, and compradores. From Ronda and Utrera in the south, from Huelva in the west, from Aguilar, Lerida, from all over Andalusia, the animals were being driven in for the Feria, the great animal fair that follows the fiestas of Holy Week.

The thrifty ones, early on the ground, were already settled in the city of tents and cottages, that had sprung up on the Prado de San Sebastian. The laggards fared badly; the downpour had made the roads worse than ever. The inns were crowded, for even those who usually slept, cooked, and ate in their covered carts struggled to get under shelter while that torrential rain lasted. Then, just in time to save the situation, the sun came out.

From the quay we drove along the bank of the Guadalquiver, through orange groves washed clean and smelling of rain, and olive groves where the little, silvery leaves were still dark with the wetting. From a rise in the sodden road we saw the entire horizon, felt the sky like a fiery blue cup overhead; at the edge, where it rested on the earth, there was warm, colorless light; in the middle, deep cobalt. It was impossible, early as it was, to look at the sun; there was not a fleck of cloud anywhere. Though the earth was drying as quickly as sun and soft air could contrive, the middle of the road was still a lake of mud.

“ArrÉ, arrÉ! dog of a horse!” the sounds of blows and curses shattered the crystal silence. A brave, blind horse again and again made a mighty effort, stretching its lean neck and straining its poor body to pull a carreta out of the muddy rut where the wheels stuck fast. His master encouraged him by striking him over the head; his companion, a starved dog, by snapping at his heels. Pemberton’s hand tightened nervously on his whip, as if he would have liked to lay it about the man’s ears: Patsy was over the wheel like a flash, and out in the muddy road.

“What a pity, my friend, your wife and children must get out to lighten the load,” he said; “it is the only way; I have had great experience in such matters. You help them, while I——” he had the bridle in his hand, and was petting the panting horse as he talked. A gaunt woman suckling an infant sat in the back of the carreta; a little girl leaned against one knee, at the other crouched a boy shaking with fever; a raven drooped in a battered cage, near a big drum half hidden by a heap of spangled and velvet rags; a pair of castanets and a tambourine lay in the girl’s lap. By these poor possessions, their tools of trade, we knew them for what they were.

“Mountebanks, on their way to the fair,” said Pemberton; “poor things, one can hardly hope they will add much to the gaiety of nations!”

“See you later,” said Patsy, waving his free hand to us. We drove on and left him haranguing, hectoring, but helping, always helping, that forlorn family of feriantes (fairgoers).

After those three last days of Holy Week, when from one end of Seville to the other we never met wagon, carriage, or beast of burden, it came like a surprise to find the streets crowded with all sorts of interesting vehicles. The heavy traffic is carried in big, picturesque carts drawn by bulls, oxen, donkeys, and mules. The cattle are magnificent, especially the bulls, who answer easily to the goad. The backs of these draft animals are shaven in patterns, the work of gypsy esquiladores. In the cold weather a blanket covers the shaven part, its limits outlined by a neatly cut border. A monogram, a coat-of-arms, even a sentence describing the owner’s virtues, is sometimes shaven on the rump. The yoke is bound to the horns of the cattle, as you see it in the old Greek vase pictures; the beasts pull with the head, all the weight and strain coming on the neck. This has a fine pictorial effect, but is far harder on the creatures than yoking at the shoulders.

An ox cart, with a cruel load of stone, drawn by two patient, cream-colored bulls, lumbered along on archaic solid wheels that shrieked for axle grease. The bulls, strong, beautiful, worthy to draw the car of Dionysius, moved their heads restlessly from side to side. As the cart jounced over a loose cobble, their poor noses trembled with pain. A street porter stood waiting till the cart had passed to cross the road. He carried a heavy load on his back, secured by a strap fastened round the forehead; he trembled, too, and seemed, like the bulls, to be working at great disadvantage.

Pemberton shook his whip at the bulls. “Cowards,” he cried, “failures, outcasts of the ring; too timid or too kind to fight,—unworthy the short, merry life of the fighting bull, good for nothing but work!”

A blue cart with ochre stripes creaked by, behind a tandem of four mules led by a white donkey, all jingling with little bells, the harnesses gay with red tags, tassels, and brass nailheads.

“FirmÉ, firmÉ macho!” The muleteer, a jolly young chap with a proper “going to the fair” look to match his team, cracked his long whip over their heads. A dog tied to the bridle of a tiny donkey, almost hidden by his load of cabbages, cleverly piloted the ass through the crowd; the owner, a stalwart woman laden with vegetables, followed at a distance.

“And some people say animals can’t reason!” Pemberton exclaimed. “That dog has got more sense than many men I know. The woman is Costanza, Isidro’s wife, who brings us our vegetables every day; that boy tagging behind is Concepcion’s godson.”

We were now close to the Feria, and the way was crowded with feriantes and cattle.

There was a sense of joyous life in the air. Everybody was in holiday humor, as if the sun had dried all tears, driven away blues and vapors, if such exist in golden Seville.

“During the three days of the Feria,” Pemberton explained, “Seville is deserted; life centres here, in the Prado San Sebastian; trade, business, society are bodily transported from city to fair ground. It’s really a democratic festival; a great annual outing for all classes. The morning is the time to see the business end; the evening, the social. We’ll begin with the market, where the animals are bought and sold.”

At the mule mart business was brisk, handsome carriage mules as well as pack mules changing hands at good prices. To know what a carnation or a mule can be, you must go to Spain, where both grow larger and handsomer than anywhere else. There is a legend of a mule belonging to the first Don Carlos, over fifteen hands high. Theoretically, the mule has the privilege of drawing the royal carriages. Though Don Alfonzo prefers an automobile, the little children of the late Princess of the Asturias take their airing every day behind a spanking four-in-hand of swift, black mules.

Up and down the middle of the Prado San Sebastian rode the jockeys, showing off their horses. A tall, black stallion, with red nostrils, curvetted past. The man on his back—he rode like a centaur, man and beast seeming one piece—had a familiar look; where had we seen that ruddy face, those handsome legs, that striped blanket before? The fretting stallion jostled a white horse ridden by a weather-beaten old trader.

“Perdone Vd. amigo mio!” said the young chalan, lifting his gray felt sombrero. Then we recognized the Sibyl’s friend, the bridegroom of Ronda.

“No es nada amigo,” answered the man on the white, as politely; the exhibition of good manners was as fine as the horsemanship.

“I will give you twelve thousand reales for the black,” said a gentleman in a cloak, to the man from Ronda.

“Caballero, if I could only afford to make you a gift! Try him, he has the perfect paso Castellano!”

“Twelve thousand, not a real more.”

“Antes muerto que cansado!” (He’d die sooner than tire.)

“Twelve thousand, not another maravedi.” The bargain was finally struck, chalan and caballero going off together to bind it.

“The pace of these Andalusian horses,” Pemberton pointed out, “is easy as a rocking-chair; there is nothing like it. It comes from their galloping with the fore feet and trotting with the hind. Arabian blood? Ah! there is the mystery of the Cordova breed. Where did they get it? De Soto took out a lot of the stock to America; they ran wild on the western plains: our bronchos are their descendants. Though the build has changed, you recognize the family traits in the American mustang.”

The white, a beautiful fiery creature, with floss-silk mane hanging to his knees, a tail that would have swept the ground had it not been knotted up, Patsy was convinced must be an Arabian.

“He looks it,” Pemberton “allowed.” “The Arab horse, unfortunately, is not what it once was; it has been spoiled—by what, do you think? The Mauser rifle! In the old days a Bedouin’s safety depended on his horse’s speed; to outride his enemy and the reach of his enemy’s spear was his prime need. Then it was a matter of life and death to keep up the breed. The old order changeth, even in the desert. Now, the Bedouins are armed with rifles; no horse can travel as fast as a rifle bullet flies; the Bedouin grows careless, his horse deteriorates. In England, where they’re all mad, there’s one man mad, or sane enough, to put his heart and his money into trying to save the noble race from extinction, the sort of a thing only a poet like Wilfred Blunt would try to do.”

“Tres, ocho, todos,” from behind a gypsy tent came the staccato cry of the morra players. Two men faced each other, throwing out the hand with a quick movement, each crying at the same moment his guess of the total number of fingers shown; a dangerous old game, ending, too often, in a fight.

There was great animation in the pig market; the prices were the highest in years; the demand for sucking pigs was larger than the supply. A magnificent old Mother Grunt, with a litter of black piglets snuggling about her, wore the blue ribbon of the prize winner round her fat neck. The owner, a well-dressed young farmer, stood beside the likely family.

“May I have a photograph of the pig?” I asked.

“The honor is great,” said the farmer, “but the photographer lives far from here, and to-morrow I put the earth between us.”

“How foolish thou art!” explained a shrewd old farmer, carrying a white lamb in his arms. “It is the little black box of the stranger lady that makes the picture.” They all struck attitudes, the kodak snapped, I set the film for the next shot; the farmer wished to look into the kodak where he thought he could see the photograph of the prize pig. The matter was explained to him, and the offer made to send him a photograph when the film should be developed. J. handed him his pencil and note-book, and asked him to write his name and address.

“OjalÁ, if I only knew how to write!” he sighed. “It is greatly to be lamented. I should value a portrait of my sow; she is without peradventure the finest I have raised. I shall not meet her again, for I have sold her to a labrador of Jimena.”

“Tell me your name; I will write it in this book, where it will not be forgotten.”

“I call myself Basilio, name of baptism, Miquel; name of father——”

“That is not necessary; from what town?”

“Pueblo of birth, Escacena del Campo, Provincia de Huelva.”

Finding us interested in live stock, Miquel showed his other animals, and led the way to the roped-in corral, where a bunch of his sheep stood hanging their patient heads, as if shy to find themselves so much admired. The merinos were superb, with fine, silvery fleeces; the horns of the old wether might have inspired the Ionic order! The mere rumor of such splendid creatures would account for the cruise of the Argonauts. As handsome in their way were the small, brown sheep, with black faces and adorable, close-curled, black horns. While Miquel and J. exchanged views on sheep, a seedy, shabby gentleman in shiny clothes and a frayed shirt joined us. He took off his hat with a flourish, and made me a deep bow.

“Missis, I am Renaldo Lopez, ex-ofeecial de marina,” he said, in a bass voice, deep as a lion’s. “I offrÉ my service to accompany and visit monuments; gib Spanish lessons (spik vero Castellano, no Andalusian) in pupils resident or in professor home, prices moderates.” He recited the words as if repeating a lesson. I thanked him, accepted his card, and turned back to handsome Miquel, who was explaining to J. that besides raising the best wool in the province, he was not behind the rest of the world in the matter of wheat; he would dare say his was the best grown within a hundred leagues. If we passed near Escacena del Campo we must stop at his farm. He could show us the sister of the prize pig, whose photograph we would remember to send? The poor, shabby-genteel ex-ofeecial de marina, could not believe that Miquel, grower of the best wheat, raiser of the fattest pigs and the finest sheep in the province was more interesting to us than he was! Though he could not read or write, Miquel could carry on civilization’s two great basic industries—provide for the clothing and the feeding of man, and do it well! The professor of Castilian clung to us until an appointment was made for a lesson, then he departed, and we wandered off to the refreshment stands.

A group of handsome girls were gathered round a huge cauldron outside a neat booth, from which floated a delicious odor of fried cakes.

“Who’s hungry?”

“Everybody!”

“Soledad!” A tall girl in a clean, print dress, a scarlet shawl pinned across her shoulders, a geranium in her coarse black hair, answered Pemberton’s call.

“Serve buÑuelos for all.”

I asked Pemberton why he had used the second person instead of the third, in speaking to Soledad—what a name! It means solitude.

“It is the custom. The poorest Spaniard addresses the richest gypsy as ‘thou,’ on the ground that the Gitano is the inferior race. These people are buÑoleras; they travel all over Spain from fair to fair, frying these buÑuelos, a sort of sublimated fritter, their specialty. No one else has the art. I know this family; the women are a good sort; the men,—lazy rascals! Last summer they stole two of my sheep; lassooed them, lifted them clean out of the fold. I traced them to their camp. What do you suppose I found? Instead of my white sheep, two black sheep; they had the stuff all ready, and clapped the creatures in; by the time I got there they were already dyed.”

An elderly woman, vigorous, bronzed, with the bold, unwinking eyes of the Romany, stood beside the cauldron making mysterious passes with a long spoon. Soledad waited by her side with a hot dish, and in a twinkling a pile of golden bubbles was before us, light, dry, exquisite as only fritters fried in pure olive oil can be.

“Fried air, with a trifle of pastry around it,

is not exactly filling at the price,” said Pemberton; “let us try some of those bocas de la isla, another specialty of the Feria.” The bocas are a sort of shell fish of peculiar shape, tasting rather like a shrimp. Soledad, watching us cautiously taste them, said to reassure us:

“But—they are the most exquisite—what a flavor! They are the claws of lobsters that have been torn off and thrown back into the sea, where they turn into bocas!”

“Cocoanuts, dates, torrones of Alicante!” a bright-eyed Levantine, smelling trade, hurried up to us. We bought a handful of large dark Tetuan dates, a green cocoanut, a long thin bottle of attar of roses, and—a torrone—a paste of blended honey and almonds, that should be reserved for saints, since none others can be good enough to deserve it!

Luncheon over, we took leave of Soledad, and made our way to one of the humbler streets of the Feria in search of side shows. There was a choice of attractions, all of them decent. In one tent we saw a tame gorilla and a fat woman; in another a troupe of trained fleas shown off by an Italian. An air from Rigoletto, played by an orchestrion with drums, horns and cymbals drew a crowd of rustics. From a large tent came the twang of a guitar, the crack of castanets. A group of saucy gypsy lasses laid violent hands upon us Gorgios, whose palms, whether or no, they were bound to read.

“Brazen hussies,” said Pemberton good-naturedly, buying them off; “a cut below those others, but virtuous,—who doubts it may get a knife thrust in the back!”

Outside the last and poorest amusement tent, we found Patsy’s mountebanks. An old carpet was spread on the ground before the tent door; the woman in a spangled, maroon velvet robe, a gilt filet in her faded hair, beat the big drum. The raven, with the aid of the little girl and a pack of cards, was ready to tell fortunes. The man in pink tights balanced cleverly on a rolling ball: the boy stood with outstretched arms, first on the father’s shoulders, and then climbed dizzily to his head. The turn ended in a clever somersault.

“OllÉ, ollÉ!” the crowd encouraged.

“Que te hace trabajar?” cried the mountebank, the clown’s strident voice is the same the world over, “Que te hace trabajar?” (What makes you work?)

“El hambre!” (hunger), answered the pinched child.

“Tiene razon!” (he is right), laughed Miquel, the farmer. The crowd applauded; a few coppers rattled in the girl’s tambourine.

We came upon Patsy, lost since morning, outside a booth of primitive farming tools. The sickles, the rakes, the spades, shaped properly like spades in a pack of cards, even the hoes, had a certain rustic beauty that woke the Adam in every boy that passed, and made his fingers itch to handle them. Patsy balanced a mighty scythe knowingly, as one who has known the trick of mowing.

“That is just what I want for my picture of ‘Time and the Woman,’” said J.; he looked with longing at the scythe.

“Of course, it is the very thing,” said Patsy; “it has a lot of character. It doesn’t look as if it had been turned out by a machine with a thousand others. Listen to this bell!” He tinkled the clapper of a beaten-copper sheep bell. “What a silver note! One wouldn’t mind being wakened by this, when the cows go to pasture at daylight!”

“These juggets,” Pemberton led the way to a booth where coarse glazed pottery was displayed, “are nice in color, aren’t they?”

“The green and yellow bowls are just the thing to put about the Cornish place for the birds to drink and take their baths from,” said Patsy. “Let us have a lot sent home with the scythe and the bell. How you feel the Moorish influence in the design,—you can’t get away from that, can you? You might as well try to subtract the Norman from the English, as to subtract the Moor from the Spaniard; you come across him every moment, in the manners, in the language—all the words beginning with al are Moorish; in the dress,—the mantilla is the survival of the yashmak; in the sense of color and design, that flat, blue dish is a thing of beauty and absolutely Moorish in spirit.”

“I can’t enthuse about it any more than I could about the Alhambra, the Alcazar, or anything else that recalls the presence of those brutes in Spain,” interrupted a small, keen-eyed man who had been listening to the talk.

Patsy was the first to recover his speech.

“That is a new point of view and very interesting,” he said. “Does all Oriental art affect you so, or only Moorish?”

The little gentleman answered with another question: “You are Protestants?”

We could not deny the fact. The stranger sighed impatiently. “Ah well, that explains many things! No traveler who is not a Catholic can understand or appreciate Spain.”

“You can enjoy a lot you don’t understand.” Patsy stood to his guns.

“You miss the history, lose the background of the tapestry,” the stranger went on testily. “I am tired of this fool talk about Moorish art; the Mosque of Cordova spoiled by being turned into a Christian church, and all the rest of it. Rubbish! I say it was a good thing to do!” His eyes shone, his cheeks burned, he held up a hand enforcing attention. “Listen to what I tell you,—Hell is not too hot, nor eternity too long to punish the sins of the Moors against the Christians of Spain.”

“Do you know where you are standing?” Pemberton struck the earth with his heel as he said it. “This is the old quemadero, the burning-ground of the Inquisition. On this spot two thousand persons, many of them Moors, were tortured and burned alive in one year. Is there any circle in your Inferno for the Grand Inquisitors?”

“What is the use of remembering such disagreeable things? They are much better forgotten!” cried the stranger, irritably. “I took you for persons of more sense!” and he went off in a huff.

“I wish he had liked us better, I liked him so much,” murmured Patsy. “It’s the first rule of travel, isn’t it?—talk with people you would not be likely to know at home, and learn their creeds.”

“The second rule,” said Pemberton, “is, visit different epochs as well as different countries. I have visited in the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, the Ages of Stone and of Iron; only the Golden Age I have not found. Seville comes nearest to it! Follow the old trade routes, go where the bagmen go, make friends with traders and drummers. The gods of Greece came into Rome in the chapman’s pack. Avoid, on your life, the smug hotels, the tourist tickets that make the great pleasure route of the world so comfortable, so safe, so dull. Take the checker and chance of travel. There is as much adventure left in the world as is good for a man, if he will take a risk or two!”

“The third rule is, buy no thing; spend all your money on impressions; they will be good as new when mementos are lost, stolen, or in the dust bin!”

“The fourth rule,” said J., “is go slow. Yesterday three hundred tourists saw Seville in four hours. They were driven all over the place in batches, each man and woman of them tagged with the card of the hotel where they were billeted to dine. The Liberal said this morning that it was better to be four hundred years behind the world than to be in such a hurry. I am not sure the Liberal is not right.”

That afternoon, Concepcion called for us in a smart two-seated cart drawn by fawn-colored mules with silken ears, varnished hoofs, and jingling bells. It was “up to her,” Pemberton said, to show us the social end of the Feria.

“Estoy vestida de maya!” she cried gleefully; “does it please them?”

“How well dressed she is, a preciosity!” Patsy’s vocabulary was growing. To be vestida de maya means to wear the lovely old Andalusian costume, still good form for Feria and bull-fights. Concepcion wore a yellow crape manton de Manilla (the fringe was ten inches long) embroidered with butterflies and roses; a white, blond lace mantilla, gold satin skirt with overdress of black net and chenille dots, lace mittens and tiny gold shoes. She carried the sort of fan collectors outside of Spain keep in a glass case,—the sticks of delicately carved mother-of-pearl; the painting, charming, eighteenth century miniature work. The artist had represented the two serious affairs in woman’s life: religion,—illustrated by a scene from sacred history, Jerusalem with David standing before Saul; and love-making,—illustrated by an Arcadian vale, where a patched and powdered shepherdess and a silk-stockinged shepherd looked fondly at each other.

Concepcion took us first to the Parque Maria Luisa, once royal property; now a people’s pleasure ground, more garden than park, with thickets of camelias, white, red, and pink, and wildernesses of roses climbing over rustic arbors, hiding dead trees, or blooming sedately in well-trimmed beds. We would have lingered in this paradise among the palms and orange trees—from an ilex grove the long, trilling cadence of a nightingale gave warning that the evening service of song was beginning—but Concepcion objected that there was nobody there, and gave the order: “To Las Delicias.”

Four lines of carriages moved at a foot pace up and down the wide paseo. Groups of horsemen, officers and civilians picked their way through the throng. The promenades on either side were crowded with pedestrians. The defile of beauty was dazzling; the seÑoritas were all smiles and animation, using their eyes to deadly purpose; in Andalusia flirtation is not a lost, even a decadent art. Patsy, wounded on every side, groaned aloud, “I wish I was a Turk, I wish I was the Sultan of Turkey!”

“In his heart, every man is a Turk!”

“Starts so,—some learn that the best of all is to come home from a flower show, and find the single rose in the flower-pot on the window-sill, sweeter than all the rest.”

So they gossipped in the carriage, while the mouse-colored mules fretted at the slow pace!

The west end, the fashionable quarter of the toy city of the Feria, has neat toy streets, dainty casetas like dolls’ houses, cafÉs, and clubs. From Conception’s account, it would seem that the Alcalde had merely waved his wand, and from the bare ground of the old quemadero the fairy city had sprung complete.

“You hire your caseta for the week,” Pemberton explained, “and send out what furniture you need from your town house.” As it grew dark, garlands of many-colored lights festooned the way; firefly lamps twinkled among the shrubbery, lanterns like great, illuminated fruits bloomed out from the dark trees; it seemed that we were wandering in Aladdin’s palace. Between the Moorish arches of the Circole de Labradores we caught a glimpse of a pretty ball-room, where a crowd of waltzers swayed to the music of the Thousand and One Nights. Outside a private caseta painted like a Japanese tea house, Patsy halted and stood immovable, till, as one by one the crowd moved on, we edged our way to the front. The caseta was open to the street. Across a tiny verandah we saw the charming interior. An elderly, bald gentleman sat at a piano playing the letter air from La Perichole. In a corner a group of ladies talked together; a little girl in white came and hung over the piano, watching the musician’s fingers.

A tall young officer with a roving blue eye and gold hair lying in crisp little curls on an ivory forehead, stood leaning against the wall, talking with a small, dark youth with a hawk nose, and black, impenetrable eyes where the fire smouldered but did not flash.

“That good-looking boy is Martin O’Shea,” said Pemberton; “Irish—need you ask? The family has been settled here a hundred, perhaps three hundred years; his eye has not lost the Celtic light, or his tongue the edge. The other is Benamiel, Moorish descent, of course; they’re both dangling after a certain girl, a friend of Concepcion’s. Oh! that is part of the fascination of this wonderful, aloof, old Spain; you can trace the races here so clearly; somehow the strains don’t seem to have become so blurred, so mixed, as in most parts of Europe.”

The two young men cast impatient looks at a curtained door at the back. “Pronto,” the signal came from the inner room. The music changed to a throbbing seguidilla, the curtain trembled, and out tripped two pretty girls vestida de maya.

“Do you see who it is?” whispered Patsy.

The taller was Luz, the other could only be her sister. Their castanets clicked, almost as naturally as fingers snap, as they took the first pose of the dance. One foot advanced, the other behind supporting the weight of the body; the right arm raised, the left extended, just as you see it in the dancing faun of Herculaneum. O’Shea took down a guitar from the peg where it hung, and swept the chords with that curious ringing touch of the Spaniard; Benamiel marked time by beating with his feet, clapping with his hands. The dance began. It was very graceful, above all very expressive, that was the great quality; it seemed the natural, spontaneous expression of those two lovely young creatures’ joy in life, of their super-abundant vitality, of the young blood coursing through their veins. Though every posture, each bold advance and timid retreat was old as Egypt, the dance had all the beautiful freshness of a primitive art.

“Viva la gracia!” The cry came from a man in the crowd, Miquel, the farmer of Huelva.

“Good work for amateurs,” said Pemberton, “but wait till you’ve seen the Imperio, then you will have an idea of what Spanish dancing is!”

“Why,” Patsy asked, “doesn’t that other girl dance?”

“Just because she is not a girl; she was married two years ago. It would not be good form; she has had her turn, now she must take a back seat and give the others a chance. Thank God we’re still at that stage of social development.” The young woman, a small morena (brunette) with a skin like a creamy magnolia blossom just beginning to turn brown, was very little older, and quite as pretty as the twin dancing stars; her foot tapped the floor, while her sisters danced and she sat talking with the elders.

“I think this could not happen outside of Spain, the most democratic of all countries,” Pemberton went on. “Here every man is equal, not merely in the law’s eye, but—what’s far more important—in his own eyes, and proves it by allowing no other man to show better manners than he. These girls, the fine flower of Seville, may safely take their part, add their beauty and their grace as the crowning attraction of the Feria, because the man in the street will be as polite to them as the gentleman in the drawing-room.”

“Bendita sea la madre que ti pario,” blessed be the mother that bore thee. It was Miquel’s parting compliment to the seÑoritas, as he made his way out of the crowd. In the caseta visitors came and went; Luz was surrounded by admirers. An old man servant handed a tray with agraz, a drink made of pounded unripe grapes, clarified sugar and water, and bolardos, little sugar cakes to dissolve in this nectar of Andalusia. The seguidilla was followed by a sevilliana. When the buoyant feet seemed tired O’Shea sang copla after copla: the last he might have learned from his mother. It is at least as old as he: