Peculiar We
Then Thought It, Though We Learned Afterward That Poultry-Farming Was
Not Uncommon On The Flat Roofs Of Seville, And There Is Now No Telling
How We Might Have Prospered If We Had Taken Those Rooms And Stocked Our
Roof With Plymouth Rocks And Wyandottes.
At the moment, however, we
thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the
manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience,
and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.
Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic
chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was
so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock
in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her zeal
made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot, _"Caliente,
caliente,"_ and her voice would have quieted the street under our
windows if music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she grew
trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for poor people in Seville;
how she had three dollars a month and her husband four; and how they had
to toil for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly enough, what
they singly and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than
coveted the happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go,
but they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had left
the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran
for it, shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she
did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never wanting
to the Spanish poor. Very likely if I ransacked my memory I might find
instances of their abusing those advantages over the stranger which
Providence puts in the reach of the native everywhere; but on the spur
of the moment, I do not recall any. In Spain, where a woman earns three
dollars a month, as in America where she earns thirty, the poor seem to
abound in the comparative virtues which the rich demand in return for
the chances of Heaven which they abandon to them. There were few of
those rendering us service there whom we would not willingly have
brought away with us; but very likely we should have found they had the
defects of their qualities.
When we definitely turned our backs on the potential poultry-farm
offered us at our hotel, we found ourselves in as good housing at
another, overlooking the length and breadth of the stately Plaza San
Fernando, with its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon
swimming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By day, of course,
we did not see it, but the sun was visibly there, rather blazing hot,
even in mid-October, and showing more distinctly than the moon the
beautiful tower of the Giralda from the waist up, and the shoulder of
the great cathedral, besides features of other noble, though less noble,
edifices.
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