He Is Always Opening Some Other Gate Or Shutting Some Other Door, Or Settling The Affairs Of The Nation With A Friend In The Next Block, Or Carrying On A Chronic Courtship At The Lattice Of Some Olive-Cheeked Soubrette Around The Corner.

Be that as it may, no one ever found him on hand; and there is nothing to do but to sit down on the curbstone and lift up your voice and shriek for him until he comes.

At two o'clock of a morning in January the exercise is not improving to the larynx or the temper. There is a tradition in the very name of this worthy. He is called the Sereno, because a century or so ago he used to call the hour and the state of the weather, and as the sky is almost always cloudless here, he got the name of the Sereno, as the quail is called Bob White, from much iteration. The Sereno opens your gate and the door of your house. When you come to your own floor you must ring, and your servant takes a careful survey of you through a latticed peep-hole before he will let you in. You may positively forbid this every day in the year, but the force of habit is too strong in the Spanish mind to suffer amendment.

This absurd custom comes evidently down from a time of great lawlessness and license, when no houses were secure without these precautions, when people rarely stirred from their doors after nightfall, and when a door was never opened to a stranger.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 45 of 254
Words from 11906 to 12171 of 67759