I Do Not Know What Polite Offers From Him Had Already Brought Out The Thanks In Which Our Speech Bewrayed Us; But At Our Outlandish Accents They At Once Became Easier.

They became frankly at home with themselves, and talked in their Andalusian patter with no fear of being understood.

I might, indeed, have been far apter in Spanish without understanding their talk, for when printed the Andalusian dialect varies as far from the Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, and when spoken, more. It may then be reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and from the lips of some speakers it is really no more consonantal than if it came from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft _c_ or the _z,_ as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the _s_ instead, as the readerwill find amusingly noted in the Sevillian chapters of _The Sister of San Sulpice,_ which are the most charming chapters of that most charming novel. At the stations there were sometimes girls and sometimes boys with water for sale from stone bottles, who walked by the cars crying it; and there were bits of bright garden, or there were flowers in pots. There were also poor little human flowers, or call them weeds, if you will, that suddenly sprang up beside our windows, and moved their petals in pitiful prayer for alms. They always sprang up on the off side of the train, so that the trainmen could not see them, but I hope no trainman in Spain would have had the heart to molest them.

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