Fortunately, We Turned To The Right
After Crossing The Bridge And So Escaped The Gipsy Quarter, But We
Paused Through A Long Street So Swarming With Children That We Wondered
To Hear Whole Schoolrooms Full Of Them Humming And Droning Their Lessons
As We Made Our Way Among The Tenants.
Fortunately, they played mostly in
the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their years and
riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which childhood
bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe.
To say that those Spanish
children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish babies as English
children is to say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a babe as
only a mother can in an office which the pictures and images of the Most
Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle
is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms
and crooned whatever was the Spanish of -
Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b'ar;
Rack back, baby, see it hangin' thar.
For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our
backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and
hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic
joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a
hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came
to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of beneficent projects and
ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These roads
were made about the middle of the eighteenth century, and they have been
gathering dust ever since, so that the white powder now lies in the one
beyond Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides occasional
shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened
away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with
flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens, and
the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of the
foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives
heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday
breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside;
our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was
"bad."
VII
We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we
met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and
very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came
to the village that was a _municipium_ under Augustus and a _colonia_
under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and
self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio
Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as we
glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide
flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless,
but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place
a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing
it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry.
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