The Laconic Fidelity Of My Note-Book Enables Me To Recall Here That The
Last We Saw Of Seville Was
The Cathedral and the Giralda, which the
guide-books had promised us we should see first; that we passed some
Fields of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from Africa and the
Spanish have carried to America; that in places men were plowing and
that the plowed land was red; that the towns on the uplands in the
distance were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in Castile; that
the morning sky was blue, with thin, pale clouds; that the first station
out was charmingly called Two Brothers, and that the loungers about it
were plain, but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some actually
clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her hair; that Two
Brothers is a suburb of Seville, frequented in the winter, and has
orange orchards about it; that farther on at one place the green of the
fields spread up to the walls of a white farm with a fine sense of
color; that there were hawks sailing in the blue air; that there were
grotesque hedges of cactus and piles of crooked cactus logs; that there
were many eucalyptus trees; that there were plantations of young olives,
as if never to let that all-pervading industry perish; that there were
irregular mountain ranges on the right, but never the same kind of
scenery on both sides of the track; that there was once a white cottage
on a yellow hill and a pink villa with two towers; that there was a
solitary fig tree near the road, and that there were vast lonely fields
when there were not olive orchards.
Taking breath after one o'clock, much restored by our luncheon, my
note-book remembers a gray-roofed, yellow-walled town, very suitable for
a water-color, and just beyond it the first vineyard we had come to.
Then there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall poplars
pollarded plume fashion as in southern France; and in a field a herd of
brown pigs feeding, which commended itself to observance, doubtless, as
color in some possible word-painting. There now abounded pomegranates,
figs, young corn, and more and more olives; and as if the old olives and
young olives were not enough, the earth began to be pitted with holes
dug for the olives which had not yet been planted.
II
At Bobadilla, the junction where an English railway company begins to
get in its work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted
enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when.
a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, "Tea, sir?" I gladly closed with
the proposition. "But you've put hot milk into it!" I protested. "I
know it, sir. We 'ave no cold milk at Bobadilla," and instantly a
baleful suspicion implanted itself which has since grown into a upas
tree of poisonous conviction:
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 162 of 197
Words from 84518 to 85017
of 103320
