The Decent Place Was Filled With The "Plain People," Who Sat With Their Hats On At Rude Tables Smoking And Drinking Coffee From Tall Glasses.

They were apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly all their wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these also had come.

On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfashionably and untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers in their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man among them. One after another they got up and did the same twisting and posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse cries of "Ole!" It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house its money's worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and stormed the audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and legs, head, neck, and the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have equaled or approached. Whatever was fiercest and wildest in nature and boldest in art was there, and now the house went mad with its hand-clappings and table-hammerings and deep-throated "Oles!"

Another night we went to the academy of the world-renowned Otero and saw the instruction of Sevillian youth in native dances of the _haute ecole._ The academy used to be free to a select public, but now the chosen, who are nearly always people from the hotels, must pay ten pesetas each for their pleasure, and it is not too much for a pleasure so innocent and charming. The academy is on the ground floor of the _maestro's_ unpretentious house, and in a waiting-room beyond the shoemaker's shop which filled the vestibule sat, patient in their black mantillas, the mothers and nurses of the pupils. These were mostly quite small children in their every-day clothes, but there were two or three older girls in the conventional dancing costume which a lady from one of the hotels had emulated. Everything was very simple and friendly; Otero found good seats among the _aficionados_ for the guests presented to him, and then began calling his pupils to the floor of the long, narrow room with quick commands of "_Venga_!" A piano was tucked away in a corner, but the dancers kept time now with castanets and now by snapping their fingers. Two of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates, were "differently beautiful" in their darkness and fairness, but alike picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses and the black veils fluttering from their high combs. A youth in green velvet jacket and orange trousers, whose wonderful dancing did him credit as Otero's prize pupil, took part with them; he had the square-jawed, high-cheek-boned face of the lower-class Spaniard, and they the oval of all Spanish women. Here there was no mere posturing and contortioning among the girls as with the gipsies; they sprang like flames and stamped the floor with joyous detonations of their slippers. It was their convention to catch the hat from the head of some young spectator and wear it in a figure and then toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part of a _torero_ at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a green satin cloak which she then waved before a man's felt hat thrown on the ground to represent the bull hemmed about with _banderillas_ stuck quivering into the floor. But the prettiest thing was the dancing of two little girl pupils, one fair and thin and of an angelic gracefulness, and the other plump and dark, who was as dramatic as the blond was lyrical. They accompanied themselves with castanets, and, though the little fatling toed in and wore a common dress of blue-striped gingham, I am afraid she won our hearts from her graceful rival. Both were very serious and gave their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more childishly earnest than an older girl in black who danced with one of the gaudy graduates, panting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last with her image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her back from the place where it had hung over her heart.

V

We preferred walking home from Senor Otero's house through the bright, quiescing street, because in driving there we had met with an adventure which we did not care to repeat. We were driving most unaggressively across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend on the box beside him to help keep us from harm, when a trolley-car came wildly round a corner at the speed of at least two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our own speed was such that we could not help striking the trolley in a collision which was the fault of no one apparently. The front of the car was severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and our conversation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd assembled from the earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches between the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman arrived to _constater_ the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dispersed. The car ambled grumbling off and we drove on with some vague murmurs from our driver, whose nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat lurching and devious progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the seat beside him.

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in travel and romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have slept the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it still.

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